[HN Gopher] Intel's Humbling
___________________________________________________________________
Intel's Humbling
Author : jseliger
Score : 514 points
Date : 2024-01-30 23:42 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| noopl wrote:
| As someone that doesn't really understand the space and stuff
| that the article is talking about, I was surprised that "Apple
| Silicon" didn't appear here since from my perspective having used
| both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, it's a huge "wow" change. Was
| Apple leaving and Apple Silicon Macs being so incredibly better
| than Intel ones not actually a big deal for Intel?
| spenczar5 wrote:
| TSMC manufactures Apple Silicon. It's a good example of the
| foundry model that the article is talking about.
| jsheard wrote:
| Not only do they manufacture Apple Silicon, but Apple usually
| buys out the first runs of their new processes so they have a
| head-start against even other TSMC customers. I believe every
| 3nm wafer that TSMC makes is still going to Apple, hence the
| just-released Qualcomm SD8G3 flagship chip still being made
| on TSMC 4nm.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Nvidia's AI $trillions may influence this arrangement in
| the near future. In the recent past Nvidia has bid Samsung
| against TSMC in attempts to save costs, but Apple's
| strategy works well for as long as one foundry has a
| process advantage.
| mdasen wrote:
| I think Apple's advantages are that it has a lot of cash
| and a very predictable business. I'm not arguing that
| Nvidia doesn't have a good business, but it seems to be a
| bit less predictable and a bit less regular than Apple's
| business. Apple really knows how many chips it's going to
| want years in advance.
|
| Even if Nvidia also wants TSMC's latest process, that
| could work to Apple's advantage. Right now it's looking
| like Apple might end up with TSMC's 3nm process for 18
| months. If Apple and Nvidia split the initial 2nm
| capacity, it could be 3+ years before AMD and Qualcomm
| can get to 2nm.
|
| If Nvidia launches the RTX 50 series in late 2024 or
| early 2025 on TSMC's 3nm (which seems to be the rumor),
| what does that do for availability for AMD and Qualcomm?
| Maybe what we'll see going forward is Apple taking the
| capacity for the first year and Nvidia taking the
| capacity for the second year leaving AMD and Qualcomm
| waiting longer.
|
| That would certainly benefit Apple. Apple isn't competing
| against Nvidia. If Nvidia uses up TSMC capacity leaving
| Apple's actual competitors at a bigger disadvantage,
| that's pretty great for Apple.
| frankchn wrote:
| The chips Nvidia requires are a lot bigger (>800 mm2
| sometimes) and they are much more expensive to make on a
| cutting edge process with relatively low yields compared
| to the 100-150 mm2 chips Apple wants for its Axx iPhone
| chips.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Not a good deal for consumer IMHO. Intel is floundering and
| AMD is now always a node behind. Seems very anti-
| competitive.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several
| generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor
| thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last
| moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs
| available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models,
| because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled,
| the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better.
|
| Additionally, both Intel and AMD manufacturer CPUs for HEDT and
| servers which are far beyond anything Apple is fabricating at
| the moment. Apple has no response to Epyc, Threadripper, or
| higher end Xeon. Similarly, Apple has no equivalent to Intel,
| AMD, and Nvidia discrete GPUs.
|
| Apple made a quality cell phone chip, and managed to exploit
| chiplets and chip-to-chip interconnects to double and quadruple
| it into a decent APU. But it's still an APU, just one segment
| addressed by current x86 designs.
| kristianp wrote:
| > Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several
| generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions
|
| I don't think that was deliberate. Apple has a long history
| of not cooling their computers enough.
| yakz wrote:
| I had never even considered it was deliberate. In
| hindsight, doing it deliberately seems pretty smart, at
| least from a "let's juice the intro" perspective, but that
| would have been a really big bet.
| timschmidt wrote:
| It's an interesting question right? Do you think Apple
| never tested multiple configurations of their leading
| computer (specifically the higher end ones) over multiple
| generations, or do you think they knew what they were
| doing?
| evilduck wrote:
| Microsoft Surface Laptops were trying for similar form
| factors and having the same thermal problems at the same
| time, this isn't a grand conspiracy, all Intel laptops
| were suffering.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| They still do it. Apple silicon macs run at 100+ degrees at
| load. Apple would rather run their chips hot than turn on
| the fans, which may or may not be justified. We don't
| really see chips dying from high temps, especially for
| typical workloads a casual user would use.
| gryn wrote:
| Just wait for them to get a little older and you'll
| probably have a wave of motherboards dying in the future
| like what happened with the MBPs from around 2011 - 2013
| with apple denying it for years until the threats of
| class action lawsuits before offering replacements with
| other motherboards that also fail.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| That's pretty common for modern CPUs. Look at the temps
| for Ryzen 7xxx series.
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| > When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a
| lot better.
|
| Of course, but the average Joe does not want to wear ear
| protection when running their laptop. Nor do they want the
| battery to last 40 minutes or have it be huge brick, or have
| to pour liquid nitrogen on it to not get it to not thermal
| throttle.
|
| Apple innovated by making chips that fit the form and
| function most people need in their personal devices. They
| don't need to be the absolute fastest, but innovation isn't
| solely tied to the computing power of a processor. It make
| sense that Intel excels in the market segment where people do
| need to wear ear protection to go near their products. If
| they need to crank in an extra 30 watts to achieve their new
| better compute then so be it.
|
| We don't know the specifics of the conversations between
| Apple and Intel. Hopefully for Intel it was just the fact
| that they didn't _want_ to innovate for personal computing
| processors and not that they couldn 't.
| ericmay wrote:
| It's always curious to me how Apple's superior products are
| somehow some other company's fault.
| timschmidt wrote:
| It seems like you think I'm trying to dunk on Apple. I am
| not. Apple Silicon is a great first showing for them.
| Performance simply isn't better than Ryzen APUs running in
| the same power envelope. And power usage is what you'd
| expect of silicon running on the latest node. Further, some
| of Apple's choices - bringing memory on package, only two
| display outputs - caused regressions for their users
| compared to the previous Intel offerings.
|
| I wouldn't call what Apple did innovation - they followed
| predictable development trajectories - more integration.
| They licensed ARM's instruction set, Imagination's PowerVR
| GPU, most of the major system busses (PCIe, Thunderbolt,
| USB 3, Displayport, etc), they bonded chiplets together
| with TSMC's packaging and chip-to-chip communication
| technologies, and they made extensions (like optional x86
| memory ordering for all ARM instructions which removes a
| lot of the work of emulation). Incidentally, Apple kicked
| off it's chip design efforts by purchasing PA Semi. Those
| folks had all the power management chip design expertise
| already.
|
| But again, it's been a good first showing for Apple. I
| think they were smart to ship on-package DRAM in a consumer
| device. Now is about the right time for the CPU to be
| absorbing DRAM, as can be seen by AMD's 3D VCache in
| another form. And it's cool for Apple folks to have their
| own cool thing. Yay y'all. But I've run Linux for 20 years,
| I've run Linux on every computer I can get my hands on in
| that time, and through that lens, Apple silicon performs
| like any x86 APU in a midrange laptop or desktop. And as
| regards noise, I never hear the fans on my 7800x3D /
| 3090Ti, and it is very very noticeably faster than my M1
| Mac. Apple Silicon's great, it's just for laptops and
| midrange desktops right now.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I wouldn 't call what Apple did innovation - they
| followed predictable development trajectories - more
| integration_
|
| By this yardstick, nobody in semiconductors has ever
| innovated.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Well to be fair there _is_ an awful lot of copying and
| extending in place.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _to be fair there is an awful lot of copying and
| extending in place_
|
| That's how technology proliferates. The point is if the
| M1 wasn't innovative, that rules out pretty much
| everything AMD, Intel and potentially even NVIDIA have
| done in the last three decades.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Did they do anything in those three decades that hadn't
| been dreamt of and projected out sometime in the 60s?
| Architecturally, sure doesn't seem like it.
|
| I'd say a lot more innovation happens on the process
| side. Manufacturing.
|
| All the architecture changes look like things mainframes
| did decades ago.
| charrondev wrote:
| Somehow you are comparing Apple's first gen laptop/iPad
| chip to a a desktop setup requiring 10x the power
| consumption and 10x the physical size (for the chips and
| all the cooling required). The power envelope for these
| chips is very different and they prioritize different
| things.
| timschmidt wrote:
| That's my point. You got it. Go you.
| aurareturn wrote:
| >Apple Silicon is a great first showing for them.
| Performance simply isn't better than Ryzen APUs running
| in the same power envelope. And power usage is what you'd
| expect of silicon running on the latest node.
|
| Do you have source for this other than Cinebench R23,
| which is hand optimized for x87 AVX instructions through
| Intel Embree Engine?
|
| From all sources, Apple Silicon has 2-3x more perf/watt
| than AMD's APUs in multithread and a bigger gap in single
| thread.
| jdewerd wrote:
| Absolutely ridiculous. No, Apple did not juice the M1 by
| giving it better cooling than x86. Quite the opposite, they
| took a big chunk of their design+process wins to the bank and
| exchanged them for even cooler and quieter operation because
| that's what they wanted all along. Cool and quiet was _a
| deliverable_.
|
| It's absurd to point out that apple could have gotten higher
| perf from x86 at higher power as if it's some kind of win for
| intel. Yes, obviously they could have, that's true of every
| chip ever. They could take it even further and cool every
| macbook with liquid nitrogen and require lugging around a
| huge tank of the stuff just to read your email! They don't,
| because that's dumb. Apple goes even further than most laptop
| manufacturers and thinks that hissing fans and low battery
| life are dumb too. This leads them to low power _as a design
| constraint_ and what matters is what performance a chip can
| deliver _within that constraint_. That 's the perspective
| from which the M1 was designed and that's the perspective
| from which it delivered in spades.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Maybe it's not clear to everyone... hot transistors waste
| _more_ power as heat. It 's a feedback loop. And it doesn't
| require liquid nitrogen to nip in the bud. Running the chip
| hot benefits no one. Kicking on a fan, and racing to idle
| without throttling would use less battery power.
|
| I'm not sure what's so upsetting about the assertion that
| chips composed of a similar number of transistors, on a
| similar process node, cooled similarly, might function
| similarly. Because when all variables are controlled for,
| that's what I see.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Even taking the latest Intel has to offer with the Core
| Ultra 9 185H in a system with active cooling and putting
| it up against the fanless model of the M1 MacBook Air
| comes out equal in performance at more than triple the
| power usage - 3 years after the fact. It's got nothing to
| do with a feedback loop, there is less cooling capacity
| and not even a fan on the Apple model, the fan wasn't
| somehow needed for the performance level. Not that a
| conspiracy of Apple to run all their MacBooks like shit
| for many years prior to switching all to make Intel look
| bad is a bit ludicrous - if the problem was ever that the
| fans weren't on enough they would have just turned them
| up. Turns out, they can remove them instead!
|
| The one place I agree with you is in the > ~16 core space
| (Server style) with TBs of RAM, where total performance
| density is more important than power, they don't bother
| to really compete. Where I differ slightly is I don't
| think there is anything about the technical design that
| prevents this, just look how Epyc trounced Intel in the
| space by using a bunch of 8 core chip modules instead of
| building a monolith, rather they just don't have interest
| in serving that space. If Apple was able to turn a phone
| chip into something with the multicore performance of a
| 24 core 13900k it doesn't exactly scream "architectural
| limitation" to me.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Absolutely ridiculous. No, Apple did not juice the M1 by
| giving it better cooling than x86.
|
| This is such an uncharitable and adversarial interpretation
| of parent. Sandbagging intel =/= juicing M1.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Parent didn't deserve any charity--Apple didn't sandbag
| anyone. They made the laptop they felt was the future
| based off a processor roadmap Intel failed to deliver on.
|
| The fact that the _exact same laptop designs_ absolutely
| soared when an M1 was put in them with no changes tells
| you everything you need to know about how Intel dropped
| the ball.
| timschmidt wrote:
| There must be 20 videos in this series: https://www.youtu
| be.com/results?search_query=LTT+apple+cooli...
| whynotminot wrote:
| > The fact that the exact same laptop designs absolutely
| soared when an M1 was put in them with no changes tells
| you everything you need to know about how Intel dropped
| the ball.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Intel _did_ screw up and get stuck on 14nm for far too
| long. But then does Apple deserve credit for TSMC 's
| process advantage? AMD was never stuck in the way Intel
| was, and they have had the performance crown since for
| most kinds of workloads. I suppose Apple figured if they
| were going to switch chip vendors again it might as well
| be to themselves.
| whynotminot wrote:
| True, it's not just a story of Apple besting Intel. AMD
| has been beating them too.
|
| Rough recent history for Intel.
|
| I agree that Apple figured if they were going to switch,
| they should just go ahead and switch to themselves. But
| the choice was really to switch to either themselves or
| AMD. Sticking with Intel at the time was untenable. 14nm
| is certainly a big part of that story, and I'm glad you
| at least finally recognize there was a serious problem.
|
| If Intel had been able to deliver on their node shrink
| roadmap, perhaps Apple never would have felt the need to
| switch--or may have at least delayed those plans. Who
| knows, that's alternate history speculation at this
| point.
|
| The article in question is about Intel potentially
| getting back to some level of process parity, perhaps
| even leadership. I'm looking forward to that because I
| think a competitive market is important.
|
| But pretending Intel's laptop processors weren't garbage
| for most of the last 8 or so years is kind of living in
| an alternate reality.
| timschmidt wrote:
| I think a lot has happened in Intel land since Apple folk
| stopped paying attention, as well. Intel still has a lot
| of work to do to catch up to AMD, but they have been
| fairly consistently posting gains in all areas. Apple
| really doesn't have a power advantage other than that
| granted by their process node at this point, against
| either AMD or Intel. AMD has seemingly delayed the Strix
| Halo launch because it wasn't necessary to compete at the
| moment. And Qualcomm is taking the same path Apple has,
| but is willing to sell to anyone, and as a result has
| chips in all standalone VR headsets other than Apple's.
|
| It remains to be seen if Apple is willing or able to
| scale their architecture to something workstation class
| (the last Intel Mac Pro supported 1.5TB of ram, it's easy
| to build a 4TB Epyc workstation these days).
| whynotminot wrote:
| Intel stopped making good chips for the things Apple cared
| about: efficient, cool designs that can run well with great
| battery life in attractive consumer products.
|
| Apple "sandbagging" was them desperately trying to get a poor
| Intel product to work in laptops they _wanted_ to be thin and
| light.
|
| Even today though their designs haven't really changed all
| that much--in fact the MacBook Air is actually just as thin
| and now even completely fan-less. It just has a chip in it
| that doesn't suck.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Intel makes plenty of chips in the 15W and even 5W
| envelopes to this day. MSI just built a gaming handheld
| with one.
| whynotminot wrote:
| At those envelopes they are nowhere near as good as what
| Apple makes.
|
| Even if Intel makes a thing that doesn't mean it's
| actually any good.
|
| I had some of those Intel ULV parts back in the day. They
| sucked.
| timschmidt wrote:
| I'm not sure what you had back in the day, but even
| Intel's E cores these days are spritely. Gone are the
| days of slow Atom cores. Pretty sure an equivalently
| clocked Intel E core of today beats the fastest Intel
| core ever shipped in an Apple product.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Neither here nor there--when Apple needed Intel to ship a
| decent, performant core that didn't overheat and chew
| through battery life, they could not.
|
| Apple switched to their own silicon, and life for their
| customers has radically improved.
|
| Maybe Intel has a great E Core now. Good for them if they
| do.
| timschmidt wrote:
| It sounds like Apple just wanted to vertically integrate,
| to me. Which is a fine reason to do something. But
| doesn't require misrepresenting competitors or
| constructing a past which never happened. You do you
| though.
| evilduck wrote:
| Intel laptops cant even sleep anymore. I have a 11th Gen
| Intel space heater that invalidates every claim you've
| made in this thread. People aren't stupid, we've owned
| these shitty Intel products for years, you're fooling
| nobody.
| orangecat wrote:
| It was Apple's decision to put an 8-core i9 in an MBP
| chassis that was utterly incapable of dealing with the
| heat. Yes, the M1 is far more efficient and Apple deserves
| a lot of credit for it, but their last Intel laptops were
| much worse than they needed to be.
| whynotminot wrote:
| You can definitely point out some processor decisions
| that seemed poor in hindsight, but the fact is nothing in
| Intel's lineup at the time was any good for a laptop.
|
| Maybe they were worse than they needed to be, but the
| best they could have been with Intel would have still
| left so much to be desired.
| timschmidt wrote:
| > but the fact is nothing in Intel's lineup at the time
| was any good for a laptop.
|
| Simply false brand-oriented thinking.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Why so defensive about Intel? I think you're the one
| doing the brand-oriented thinking here.
| timschmidt wrote:
| > nothing in Intel's lineup at the time was any good for
| a laptop.
|
| You leave no room for nuance here, friend. And somehow I
| doubt you're familiar with every single one of Intel's
| tens of thousands of SKUs over decades. Intel has made a
| lot of CPUs. They're in lots of laptops. You might
| consider your wording if you're not trying to be
| corrected.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Please correct me then. I'm willing to learn about the
| Intel laptop chip that Apple could have used to achieve
| M1 performance and efficiency at the time they switched.
| You're right that I am not familiar with every one of
| Intel's SKUs they produced at the time.
| timschmidt wrote:
| M1 was released in 2020, that puts it in line with Tiger
| Lake and Comet Lake, for which I'm seeing 7 different
| SKUs at 7W TDP. The fastest of which seems to be the Core
| i7 1180G7, which seems to perform almost as well as the
| M1 while using about half as much power:
| https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-
| core-i7-1180g7-v...
|
| Just the first example I grabbed. Intel made quite a few
| more chips in the 15W and higher envelopes, still under
| M1's ~20W TDP.
|
| I didn't check their embedded SKUs yet. Nor enterprise.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Did you make a mistake in your comparison link? Because
| I've been looking at it for a few minutes now and I don't
| get it.
|
| It doesn't support your contention that Intel was making
| comparable chips at the time to the M1, I'll say that at
| the least.
| timschmidt wrote:
| I guess we're reading different graphs. The one I'm
| seeing shows Intel producing 70% of the performance with
| 35% of the power of an M1. That's... checks math...
| better performance per watt, and lower overall power
| consumption. If you want more performance, you are free
| to step up to a 15W version which outperforms the M1 at
| 70% of it's TDP.
| whynotminot wrote:
| I think I have a better sense of some of the
| misunderstanding here. I think you're taking Intel's TDP
| figures as honest and straightforward, when they really
| truly aren't.
|
| Anandtech has talked about some of Intel's TDP
| shenanigans before, even for Tiger Lake:
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-
| review...
| timschmidt wrote:
| I wouldn't call them shenanigans. At least Intel
| publishes numbers (Apple does not). There are simply a
| lot of power states Intel CPUs are capable of engaging,
| and many configuration options about when and under what
| circumstances to do so. Much of this is configurable by
| the OEM and is not hard-set by Intel, or even under
| Intel's control after the processor leaves the fab. The
| Anandtech article seems to indicate that it's perfectly
| possible to run this Intel CPU within the advertised 7W
| TDP, and that it can also be allowed to turbo up to 50W,
| which I'm sure most OEMs enable. My favorite OEMs provide
| the knobs to adjust these features.
| whynotminot wrote:
| So you're aware of this Intel TDP chicanery but trying to
| say with a straight face that these chips achieve similar
| performance and efficiency to the M1. I think that's
| pretty disingenuous.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Again, there's not chicanery going on. You asked for
| examples of chips Intel produced which were suitable for
| laptops as you claimed they produced none. I provided
| one.
| nemothekid wrote:
| It's hard for me to square your statements with actual
| real world products. The Core i7 1180G7 was the CPU in
| the ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 2 (IIRC), and that laptop got
| half the battery life of an M2 Pro and a third of the
| battery life of the M1 air.
|
| TDP doesn't seem to be the whole story - the datasheet is
| one thing, but I've yet to see a reviewer get 30 hours
| from an Intel laptop.
| timschmidt wrote:
| For sure there's interesting stuff to talk about here.
| Intel allows OEMs a lot of configuration with regard to
| TDP and various ways to measure chip temp accounting for
| thermal mass of the cooling solution and skin temperature
| of the device. Many OEMs screw it up. Even the big ones.
| Lenovo and Apple included.
|
| Screen backlight usually has as much to say about battery
| life as the CPU does. And it's hard to deny Apple's
| advantage of being fully vertically integrated. Their OS
| only needs to support a finite number of hardware
| configurations, and they are free to implement fixes at
| any layer. Most of my PC laptops make choices which use
| more power in exchange for modularity and upgradeability
| as well, like using SODIMMs for ram, and m.2 or SATA
| removeable storage, all of which consume more power than
| Apple's soldered on components.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Lots of confounders there. MacOS is probably a lot more
| power optimized than Windows, given the shared iOS
| codebase, and OS quality can impact battery life hugely
| (useless wakeups, etc).
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I don't think that was the case. I believe Apple believed
| Intels roadmap as much as anyone and them repeatedly not
| delivering inspired them to move.
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| They didn't sabotage them. The CPUs just didn't align with
| Apple's goals. It's not like they gave the M1 CPUs the
| cooling that Intel didn't get. My Mac Mini M1 never spins up
| its fans and everything is fine. I love it. If it did, I'd
| consider it a downgrade.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't think Apple "sabotaged" them but it is true that
| the M1 series came with very different thermal design
| parameters than the terminal Intel models. Apple's Intel
| laptops would ramp chip power to the max as soon as
| anything happened. Apple's M1 ramps very, very slowly,
| dwelling for hundreds of milliseconds at each voltage
| before stepping up. These are decisions that are in the
| OEM's hands and not dictated by Intel.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| It's not possible to cool those Intel cpus better and still
| have good battery life, and quiet operation in a compact
| laptop form factor. The last Intel macbooks would get very
| hot and very loud when running hard, and kill the battery in
| minutes... my M1 never makes a sound or feels even slightly
| warm to the touch when running hard, yet is a heck of a lot
| more powerful, and can run hard all day long on a single
| battery charge.
| eigen wrote:
| 2019 15" Macbook Pro with i9-9980HK has 1383/6280 Geekbench
| score. [1] generic user submitted Intel Core i9-9980HK has
| 1421/6269 Geekbench score. [2] a <3% difference doesn't seem
| like Apple sandbagging with anemic cooling.
|
| [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-15-inch-
| mid-2...
|
| [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-
| core-i9-9980h...
| javier2 wrote:
| There are many different reasons. Firstly, Apple built
| experience over a decade designing and building the chips,
| taking over more and more of the design and IP. Then making
| these chips at a Intel competitor TSMC, who has a different
| business model to Intel. Apple were also willing to compromise.
| The first years had weird experiences for customers with
| Rosetta, broken apps and Macs that could only drive a single
| external monitor and connect to few devices. Yet we clearly saw
| the power efficiency from the better foundry tech at TSMC,
| coupled with decade of saving watts for mobile phone batteries.
| sillywalk wrote:
| I don't think Macs really amounted to much $ in sales for
| Intel, compared to e.g. Dell etc.
| autokad wrote:
| Intel's 2010 7.6B$ purchase of mcafee was a sign that Intel
| doesn't know what its doing. In the CEO's words: The future of
| chips is security on the chip. I was like no, no its not! I
| wanted them to get into mobile and GPUs at the time. Nvdia's
| market cap was about 9B at the time. I know it would have been a
| larger pill to swallow, and likely had to bid a bit more than 9B,
| but I thought it was possible for Intel at the time.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| It would have had the same fate as the NVIDIA ARM deal.
| adventured wrote:
| Maybe, however, the GPU market was not considered so
| incredibly valuable at the time (particularly by eg
| politicians in the US, Europe or China). Today it's a
| critical national security matter, and Nvidia is sitting on
| the most lucrative semiconductor business in history. Back
| then it was overwhelmingly a segment for gaming.
| tw04 wrote:
| Unlikely with AMD owning ATI. The reason NVidia was blocked
| from buying ARM was because of the many, many third parties
| that were building chips off ARM IP. Nvidia would have become
| their direct competitor overnight with little indication they
| would treat third parties fairly. Regulators were rightly
| concerned it would kill off third party chips. Not to mention
| the collective lobbying might of all the vendors building ARM
| chips.
|
| There were and are exactly zero third parties licensing
| nvidia IP to build competing GPU products.
| paulmd wrote:
| one example would be the semicustom deal with mediatek
|
| https://corp.mediatek.com/news-events/press-
| releases/mediate...
|
| like it's of course dependent on what "build competing
| products" means, but assuming you mean semicustom (like AMD
| sells to Sony or Samsung) then nvidia isn't as intractibly
| opposed as you're implying.
|
| regulators can be dumb fanboys/lack vision too, and nvidia
| very obviously was not spending $40b just to turn around
| and burn down the ecosystem. Being kingmaker on a valuable
| IP is far more valuable than selling some more tegras for a
| couple years. People get silly when nvidia is involved and
| make silly assertions, and most of the stories have become
| overwrought and passed into mythology. Bumpgate is...
| something that happened to AMD on that generation of gpus
| too, for instance. People baked their 7850s to reflow the
| solder back then too - did AMD write _you_ a check for
| their defective gpu?
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLWkNPTyg2k
| bombcar wrote:
| He was right but for the wrong reasons.
|
| Had Intel figured out hyperthreading security and avoided all
| the various exploits that later showed up ...
| quatrefoil wrote:
| Then they would have worse-performing chips and the market
| wouldn't care about the security benefits. Cloud providers
| may grumble, but they aren't the most important market
| anyway.
| nottorp wrote:
| Has there ever been an exploit in the wild for
| rowhammer/whatever the other vulnerabilities were?
| anyfoo wrote:
| > The future of chips is security on the chip. I was like no,
| no its not!
|
| Putting aside whether the statement is considered true or not,
| buying McAfee under the guise of the kind of security meant
| when talking about silicon is... weird, to say the least.
| lmm wrote:
| McAfee makes their money from people being required to run it
| for certification. Imagine government/healthcare/banking/etc.
| customers being obliged to use only Intel chips because
| they'll fail their audits (which mandate on-chip antivirus)
| otherwise. I hate it, but I can see the business sense in
| trying.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Still, $7.6B is ludicrous money for a "try", especially
| when everyone in the room should have known how shaky the
| fundamentals were for such a pitch.
| wredue wrote:
| I'm not sure mcaffee is the go to for this requirement any
| longer. Maybe. Definitely across the 4 enterprise I've
| worked at, they all migrated away from mcaffee.
| dboreham wrote:
| MBAs eating the world one acquisition at a time.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| He was a process engineer
| kibwen wrote:
| It's never too late to go back to school.
| NtochkaNzvanova wrote:
| The CEO at the time of the McAfee acquisition was Paul
| Otellini -- an MBA:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Intel has an amazing track record with acquisitions --
| almost none of them work out. Even the tiny fraction of
| actually good companies they acquired, the Intel culture
| is one of really toxic politics and it's very hard for
| acquired people to succeed.
|
| I wish Pat well and I think he might be the only who
| could save the company if it's not already too late.
|
| Sourced: worked with many ex-Intel people.
|
| POSTSCRIPT: I have seen from the inside (not at Intel)
| how a politically motivated acquisition failed so utter
| spectacularly due to that same internal power struggle. I
| think there are some deeply flawed incentives in
| corporate America.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Not gonna lie, I had a professor who retired from Intel
| as a director or something like that. Worst professor I
| had the entire time. We couldn't have class for a month
| because he 'hurt his back,' then half us saw him playing
| a round of golf two days later.
| jomohke wrote:
| There's definitely a lot that can be critiqued about that
| period.
|
| Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor
| division just before smartphones took off.
|
| The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more
| of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.
| dralley wrote:
| >Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor
| division just before smartphones took off.
|
| Wasn't that AMD (perhaps also AMD)? Qualcomm Adreno GPUs are
| ATi Radeon IP, hence the anagram.
| tverbeure wrote:
| Intel divested their StrongARM/XScale product line.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Yes, just before the iPhone came out and with Apple newly
| fully engaged as a major Intel CPU customer (for x86
| Macs) for the first time ever.
|
| Kind of like Decca Records turning down The Beatles.
| tirant wrote:
| Intel sold their XScale family of processors to Marvell in
| 2006.
|
| I remember very well as back then I was working in
| University porting Linux to an Intel XScale development
| platform we had gotten recently.
|
| After I completed the effort, Android was released as a
| public beta and I dared to port it too to that Development
| Board as a side project. I thought back then Intel was
| making a big mistake by missing that opportunity. But Intel
| were firm believers in the x86 architecture, specially on
| their Atom Cores.
|
| Those little Intel PXA chips were actually very capable, I
| had back then my own Sharp Zaurus PDA running a full Linux
| system on an Intel ARM chip and I loved it. Great
| performance and great battery life.
| TylerE wrote:
| It's really sort of been downhill since they decided to play
| the speed number game over all else with the Pentium IV. Even
| the core i7/i9 lines that were good for a long time have gone
| absolutely crazy lately with heat and power consumption.
| toast0 wrote:
| Intel's market reality is (percieved) speed sells chips.
|
| It's embarassing when they go to market and there's no way
| to say it's faster than the other guy. Currently, they need
| to pump 400W through the chip to get the clock high enough.
|
| But perf at 200w or even 100w isn't that far below perf at
| 400w. If you limit power to something like 50w, the compute
| efficiency is good.
|
| Contrast that to Apple, they don't have to compete in the
| same way, and they don't let their chips run hot. There's
| no way to get the extra 1% of perf if you need it.
| TylerE wrote:
| Oh, I'm quite well aware. I traded a spaceheater of an
| i9/3090 tower for an M1 Studio.
|
| The difference in performance for 95% of what I do is
| zero. I even run some (non-AAA) Windows games via
| crossover, and that's driving a 1440p 165hz display. All
| while it sits there consuming no more than about 35w
| (well, plus a bit for all my USB ssds, etc) and I've
| never seen the thermals much past 60c, even running
| nastive-accelerated LLMs or highly multithreaded chess
| engines and the like. Usually sits at about 40c at idle.
|
| It's exactly what almost 40 year old me wants out of a
| computer. It's quiet, cool, and reliable - but at the
| same time I'm very picky about input devices so a-bring-
| your-own peripherals desktop machine with a ton of USB
| ports is non-negotiable.
| huppeldepup wrote:
| a lot that can be critiqued about that period.
|
| Like the time they appointed Will.I.Am?
|
| https://youtu.be/gnZ9cYXczQU
| brutus1213 wrote:
| I remember when they did random stuff like the whole IoT push
| (frankly, their offerings made no sense to humble me ..
| Microsoft had a better IoT than Intel). They did drone crap ..
| gave a kick ass keynote at CES I recall .. also .. made little
| sense. Finally, the whole FPGA thing .. makes little sense. So
| much value being destroyed :(
| stefan_ wrote:
| I remember when they bought a smart glasses company then
| refunded every buyer ever the full retail price. There hasn't
| been an Intel acquisition that has worked out in some 20
| years now it seems. Just utterly unserious people.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > There hasn't been an Intel acquisition that has worked
| out in some 20 years now it seems.
|
| Maybe Habana Labs?
|
| I can't really tell if it's working out for Intel, but I do
| hear them mentioned now and then.
| TylerE wrote:
| Isn't that true for virtually EVERY big tech merger? Like,
| which ones have actually worked?
| murderfs wrote:
| Android and PA Semi have worked out pretty well...
| dangrossman wrote:
| Google built its core advertising ecosystem on
| acquisitions (Applied Semantics, DoubleClick, AdMob, etc)
| and extended it into the mobile space by buying Android.
| erik wrote:
| Youtube was also an acquisition.
|
| Haven't heard much about successful Google acquisitions
| lately though.
| landryraccoon wrote:
| Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp and they were both
| home runs. Zuckerberg knows how to buy companies.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's a different type of acquisition, right? Buying
| your competition. If nothing else you've wiped out a
| competitor.
| TylerE wrote:
| Even that sometimes flops (HP/Compaq)
| baq wrote:
| Facebook bought their eventual competitors by making an
| offer they couldn't refuse. Zuck knows Metcalfe's law.
| landryraccoon wrote:
| Instagram and WhatsApp are still popular with consumers
| though. Meta didn't kill them, if anything they've grown
| significantly.
| photonbeam wrote:
| There are the occasional good ones, like instagram.
|
| But I guess thats the problem - I had to provide an
| example
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Mostly true, but there are exceptions:
|
| Apple does really well on its rare acquisitions, but they
| aren't very public as they get successfully absorbed. PA
| Semi, Intrinsity, more I can't remember.
|
| ATi and Xilinx have by all accounts worked out really
| well for AMD.
| scns wrote:
| The iPod
| moondev wrote:
| Nvidia Mellanox
| nsteel wrote:
| Broadcom is a good example of successful mergers.
| sam_bristow wrote:
| The Altera (FPGA) acquisition could have made sense, but they
| never really followed through and now it's being spun off
| again.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| There were some technical issues with the follow-through
| that they didn't foresee. CPUs need to closely manage their
| power usage to be able to extract maximum computing power,
| and leaving a big chunk of static power on the table in
| case the FPGA needs it. The idea of putting an FPGA on a
| die was mostly killed by that.
|
| Regarding other plans, QPI and UPI for cache coherent FPGAs
| were pretty infeasible to do at the sluggish pace that they
| need in the logic fabric. CXL doesn't need a close
| connection between the two chips (or the companies), and
| just uses the PCIe lanes.
|
| FPGA programming has always been very hard, too, so the
| dream of them everywhere is just not happening.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| That was not the point of the Altera acquisition. The
| point was the fill Intel's fabs, but the fab fiasco left
| Altera/Intel-FPGA without a product to sell (Stratix 10
| -- 10nm -- got years of delay because of that). Meanwhile
| Xilinx was racing ahead on TSMC's ever shrinking process.
| krautt wrote:
| i was a process engineer there in the early 2000's, they did
| crazy random shit then too! they had an 'internet tv' pc that
| was designed to play mp4's in 2001.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| Intel pivoting to GPUs was a smart move but they just lacked
| the tribal knowledge needed to successfully ship a competitive
| GPU offering. We got Arc instead.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Isn't Arc actually pretty okay?
| inversetelecine wrote:
| It's getting better and drivers are improving all the time.
| I personally liked the Arc for the hardware AV1 encoding.
| Quicksync (I use qsvencc) is actually pretty decent for a
| hardware encoder. It won't ever beat software encoding, but
| the speed is hard to ignore. I don't have any experience
| using it for streaming, but it seems pretty popular there
| too. Nvidia has nvenc, and reviews say it's good as well
| but I've never used it.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| This. If you follow GamersNexus, there are stories every
| month about just how much the Arc drivers have improved.
| If this rate continues and the next-gen hardware
| (Battlemage) actually ships, then Intel might be a
| serious contender for the midrange. I really hope Intel
| sticks with it _this_ time as we all know it takes
| monumental effort to enter the discrete GPU market.
| dralley wrote:
| When it works, perhaps
| mastax wrote:
| They mostly work now and they are decent options at the
| low-end (what used to be the mid-range: $200) where there
| is shockingly little competition nowadays.
|
| However, they underperform greatly compared to competitors'
| cards with similar die areas and memory bus widths. For
| example the Arc A770 is 406mm^2 on TSMC N6 and a 256-bit
| bus and performs similarly to the RX 6650XT which is
| 237mm^2 on TSMC N7 with a 128-bit bus. They're probably
| losing a lot of money on these cards.
| mjevans wrote:
| Arc seems more like, where the GPU will 'be' in another 2-6
| years. Where Arc's second or third iteration might be more
| competitive. Vulkan / future focused, fast enough that some
| translation layers for old <= DX11 / OpenGL are worth it.
|
| If you're hoping for an nVidia competitor, the units in that
| market may be more per unit, but there's already an 1-ton
| gorilla there and AMD can't seem to compete either. Rather,
| Arc makes sense as an in-house GPU unit to pair with existing
| silicon (CPUs) and low / mid range dGPUs to compete where
| nVidia's left that market and where AMD has a lot of lunch to
| undercut.
| moondev wrote:
| One unfortunate note on Nvidia data center GPUs is to fully
| utilize features such as vgpu and multi-instance GPU, there
| is an ongoing licensing fee for the drivers.
|
| I applaud Intel for providing fully capable drivers at no
| additional cost. Combined with better availability for
| purchase they are competing in the VDI space.
|
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discr
| e...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Intel should have bought Nvidia.
|
| And acqu-hired Jensen as CEO.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Would that make them Ntel or Invidia?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Invidia is sort of how nvidia gets pronounced anyway, so
| I'd go with that one. Ntel sounds like they make
| telecommunications equipment in 1993.
| bonton89 wrote:
| I've heard the reason AMD bought ATI instead of Nvidia is
| Jensen wanted to be CEO of the combined company for it to go
| through. I actually AMD would be better off it they had taken
| that deal.
|
| Prior to the ATI acquisition nvidia actually had been the
| motherboard chipset manufacturer of choice for AMD cpus for a
| number of years.
| edgyquant wrote:
| AMD is doing fantastic and it's CEO is great. It would be a
| big let down if they had bought nvidia as we'd have a
| single well run company instead of two
| thijson wrote:
| McAfee was Renee James idea, she was two in a box (Intel speak
| for sharing a management spot) with Brian Krzanich.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| >>> Notice what is happening here: TSMC, unlike its historical
| pattern, is not keeping (all of its) 5nm capacity to make low-
| cost high-margin chips in fully-depreciated fabs; rather, it is
| going to repurpose some amount of equipment -- probably as much
| as it can manage -- to 3nm, which will allow it to expand its
| capacity without a commensurate increase in capital costs. This
| will both increase the profitability of 3nm and also recognizes
| the reality that is afflicting TSMC's 7nm node: there is an
| increasingly large gap between the leading edge and "good enough"
| nodes for the vast majority of use cases.
|
| My understanding is that 5nm has been and continues to be
| "problematic" in terms of yield. The move to 3nm seems to not be
| afflicted by as many issues. There is also a massive drive to get
| more volume (and a die shrink will do that), due to the demands
| of all things ML.
|
| I suspect that TSMC's move here is a bit more nuanced than the
| (valid) point that the article is making on this step...
| bgnn wrote:
| 5nm is good yield at the moment. It's even fully automotive
| qualified, which is a testament to its yield. But performance
| advantage vs cost doesn't justify to move from 7nm for a lot of
| designs. So tech adoption is getting stickier. For hogh
| performance designs like Apple CPUs going to the cutting edge
| is a given. So since 3nm is available 5nm lost its appeal. This
| is a new territory for TSMC but I think they handled it well.
| Just last year they were gearing up a lot of 5nm capacity in
| anticipation of people moving from 12 and 7nm to 5nm. It
| quickly became clear that this isn't happening. So they moved
| some of this to 3nm and some is going back to 7nm and 6nm
| (shrunk 7nm) I think. They are also cautious about buying the
| newest equipment from ASML unlike Intel and Samsung. This seems
| to play well for TSMC.
|
| I think TSMC learned from Intel's downfall more than Intel. I
| don't see any industry traction from IFS. They can research any
| new technology they want. Without wafer orders it's a recipe
| for a quick cash burn..
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Humble people don't allude to snake oil when dissing
| competition's naming scheme.
|
| Edit: relevant video, because whoever downvoted did not get what
| I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUT4d5IVY0A
| timerol wrote:
| TFA is about Intel's humbling not Intel's humility. If Intel
| was already humble, there would be no need for a humbling
| this_user wrote:
| Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor
| strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat
| on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on
| desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch
| in the data centre area.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| They ran it for max profit in an era when strategic investments
| needed to be made.
|
| It's remarkably common and heavily incentivized.
| RachelF wrote:
| No, they were on the boat, they just mis-managed it. They used
| to make Arm chips, but sold it off just before the first iPhone
| was released as they saw no future in mobile CPUs. Same with
| network processors for routers around the same time.
|
| They have been trying half-heartedly with GPUs on and off since
| the late 1990's i740 series.
|
| The root cause is probably the management mantra "focus on core
| competencies". They had an effective monopoly on fast CPUs from
| 2007 until 2018. This monopoly meant very little improvement in
| CPU speed.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Is it just the fate of large successful companies? The
| parallels with Boeing always come to mind. We've seen this play
| out so many times through history, it's why investing in the
| top companies of your era is a terrible idea.
|
| https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/f...
|
| I wonder how many of our companies will survive at the top for
| even 20 more years?
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/
|
| Berkshire is the only one I feel sure about because they hold
| lots of different companies.
| tru3_power wrote:
| Market forces are hard to fight sometimes. Look at Meta- they
| were beaten like hell cuz of their metaverse bet.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Am I missing something? Meta looks like it's at an all time
| high
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Meta was beaten because investors were worried Mark had
| gone rogue. Now that hes laid a bunch of people off to show
| that the investors are in control theyre cool with the
| metaverse.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Or maybe it has something to do with their amazing net
| income trend in recent quarters:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-
| platform...
| zeusk wrote:
| Apple makes 40% of Berkshire's investment portfolio
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| https://www.cnbc.com/berkshire-hathaway-portfolio/
|
| As of Nov 2023, BRK has ~915.5M AAPL shares, with a market
| cap of $172B. BRK's market cap is $840B.
|
| Per the CNBC link, the market cap of BRK's AAPL holding is
| 46% of the market cap of BRK's publicly listed holdings,
| but BRK's market cap being much higher than $172B/46% means
| there is $840B - $374B = $466B worth of market cap in BRK's
| non publicly listed assets.
|
| I would say $172/$840 = 20% is more representative of BRK's
| AAPL proportion.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| And the manufacturing failed to save them:
|
| _[...] when Intel's manufacturing prowess hit a wall Intel's
| designs were exposed. Gelsinger told me: 'So all of a sudden,
| as Warren Buffet says, "You don't know who's swimming naked
| until the tide goes out." [...]'_
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| You're missing the big one: they missed the boat on 64-bits. It
| was only because they had a licensing agreement in place with
| AMD that they were able to wholesale adopt AMD's extensions to
| deliver 64-bit x86 processors.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| They didn't simply miss the boat on 64 bit.
|
| That was an intentional act to force customers into Itanium,
| which was 64 bit from the outset.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| That's not at all what happened. Intel's 64-bit story was
| EPIC/IA-64/Itanium and it was an attempt to gain monopoly and
| keep x86 for the low-end. AMD64 and Itanic derailed that idea
| so completely that Intel was _forced_ by Microsoft to adopt
| the AMD64 ISA. Microsoft refused to port to yet-another
| incompatible ISA.
|
| Had Itanium been a success then Intel would have crushed the
| competition (however it did succeed in killing Alpha, SPARC,
| and workstation MIPS).
| mgerdts wrote:
| I don't think it was Itanium that killed SPARC. On
| workstations it was improved reliability of Windows and to
| some extent Linux. Sun tried to combat this with lower cost
| systems like the Ultra 5, Ultra 10, and Blade 100. Sun
| fanatics dismissed these systems because they were to PC
| like. PC fanatics saw them as overpriced and unfamiliar.
| With academic pricing, a $3500 Ultra 10 with 512 MB of RAM
| and an awful IDE drive ran circles around a $10000 HP C180
| with 128 MB of RAM and an OK SCSI drive because the Sun
| never had to hit swap. I think Dell and HP x86 PC
| workstations with similar specs as the Ultra 10 were a bit
| cheaper.
|
| On servers, 32 bit x86 was doing wonders for small
| workloads. AMD64 quickly chipped away at the places where
| 1-4 processor SPARC would have previously been used.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Fair point, Itanium's impact on SPARC might be less than
| I stated, but Alpha is very clearly documented.
| silvestrov wrote:
| I think that Itanium had zero impact on anything (besides
| draining Intel for money) due to high cost and low
| performance.
|
| It could not run x86 apps faster than x86 cpus, so it
| didn't compete in the MS Windows world. Itanium was a
| headache for compiler writers as it was very difficult to
| optimize for, so it was difficult to get good performance
| out of Itanium and difficult to emulate x86.
|
| Itanium was introduced after the dot-com crash, so the
| marked was flooded with cheap slightly used SPARC
| systems, putting even more pressure on price.
|
| This is unlike when Apple introduced Macs with PowerPC
| cpus: they had much higher performance than the 68040 cpu
| they replaced. PowerPC was price competetive and easy to
| write optimizing compilers for.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Itanium itself did nothing. But Itanium announcement
| killed basically killed MIPS, Alpha and PA-RISC. Why
| invest money into MIPS and Alpha when Intanium is gone
| come out and destroy everything with its superior
| performance.
|
| So ironically announcing Itanium was genius, but then
| they should have just canceled it.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Microsoft did port to Itanium. Customers just didn't buy
| the chips. They were expensive, the supposed speed gains
| from "smarter compilers" never materialized, and their
| support for x86 emulation was dog slow (both hardware and
| later software).
|
| No one wanted Itanium. It was another political project
| designed to take the wind out of HP and Sun's sails, with
| the bonus that it would cut off access to AMD.
|
| Meanwhile AMD released AMD64 (aka x86-64) and customers
| started buying it in droves. Eventually Intel was forced to
| admit defeat and adopt AMD64. That was possible because of
| the long-standing cross-licensing agreement between the two
| companies that gave AMD rights to x86 way back when nearly
| all CPUs had to have "second source" vendors. FWIW Intel
| felt butt-hurt at the time, thinking the chips AMD had to
| offer (like I/O controllers) weren't nearly as valuable as
| Intel's CPUs. But a few decades later the agreement ended
| up doing well for Intel. At one point Intel made some noise
| about suing AMD for something or another (AVX?) but someone
| in their legal department quickly got rid of whoever
| proposed nonsense like that because all current Intel
| 64-bit CPUs rely on the AMD license.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Maybe I wasn't clear; I meant after Itanium failed,
| Microsoft refused to support yet another 64-bit extention
| of x86 as they already had AMD64/x64 (and IA-64
| obviously)
| nine_k wrote:
| Xeon is not something people normally run on desktops.
|
| Datacenters were and still are full of monstrous Xeons, and for
| a good reason.
| nullhole wrote:
| > Datacenters were and still are full of monstrous Xeons, and
| for a good reason.
|
| To ask the foolish question, why? My guess would be power
| efficiency. I've only ever seen them in workstations, and in
| that use-case it was the number of cores that was the main
| advantage.
| asd4 wrote:
| They seem to gate ECC support behind Xeon for higher end
| processors. You see ECC memory in a lot of workstation
| class machines.
| nine_k wrote:
| It's a compact package with many cores, lots of cache
| memory, lots or RAM lanes, and lots of PCI lanes. All
| within a large but manageably hot crystal.
|
| Space and power in datacenters are at a premium; packing so
| many pretty decent cores into one CPU allows to run a ton
| of cloud VMs on a physically compact server.
|
| AMD EPYC, by the way, follows the same dtatcenter-oriented
| pattern.
| whalesalad wrote:
| They still dominate PC's and the server market.
| djha-skin wrote:
| I run all my workloads in AWS on armchips. It's half the cost
| for just as good of an experience on my side.
| paulmd wrote:
| Cloud providers are very careful to make sure of that -
| they have deliberately eschewed performance increases that
| are possible (and have occurred in the consumer market) in
| favor of keeping the "1 vcpu = 1 sandy bridge core"
| equivalence. The latest trend is those "dense cores" - what
| a shocking coincidence that it's once again sandy bridge
| performance, and you just get more of them.
|
| They don't want to be selling faster x86 CPUs in the cloud,
| they want you to buy more vcpu units instead, and they want
| those units to be arm. And that's how they've structured
| their offerings. It's not the limit of what's possible,
| just what is currently the most profitable approach for
| Amazon and google.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| The trend ain't their friend in those markets though. Many
| folks running server workloads on ARM and their customer base
| is drastically more concentrated and powerful than it once
| was. Apple has shown the way forward on PC chips.
|
| They are a dead company walking.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Very hyperbolic take. I agree there is serious competition
| elsewhere, but "dead company walking" is far from true.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Time will tell. It's not meant to be hyperbolic - I'm
| short them and lots of others are and expect it will be a
| disaster going forward. There are obviously people on the
| other side of that trade with different expectations, so
| we will see.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Looking at Statistica [0] I see Intel at 62% and AMD at 35%
| on desktop for 23Q2. That's a significant gap, and having
| more than half of the market is nothing to sneeze at, but I
| think they move from being dominant to just being a major
| player.
|
| IF (big IF) the trend continues we might see Intel and AMD
| get pretty close, and a lot more comptetion on the market
| again (I hope)
|
| On the server side, I don't have the number but that's
| probably a way harder turf to protect for Intel going
| forward, if they're even still ahead ?
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-
| int...
| megablast wrote:
| This is so common that it happens all the time with successful
| companies. They don't have to make good decisions. They have
| more than enough cash to keep making bad decision after bad
| decision, whereas a smaller company would collapse.
|
| Apple and Microsoft have both managed to avoid this, and been
| the exception.
| nimbius wrote:
| Honestly I think the real deathwatch started during
| spectre/meltdown. Intel had a real choice. They could own the
| issue, patch and use it as a chance to retool a largely broken
| architecture when corporate money was still 0% interest or
| negative interest.
|
| They didnt. Every press conference downplayed deflected and
| denied the performance issues, every patch to the Linux kernel
| was "disabled by default." They lied through their teeth and real
| players like amazon vultr and other hosting providers in turn
| left for AMD.
| orev wrote:
| I think you're vastly overestimating how much Wall Street cares
| about technical issues like this. Spectre/meltdown barely
| registers on the radar of issues that Intel has. People are
| still mostly buying Intel CPUs in laptops, desktops, and
| servers, and the N100 seems to be gaining ground in the
| Raspberry Pi space. Maybe it gave an opening for AMD in some
| markets, but Intel really hasn't seen some huge tarnished
| reputation because of it.
|
| The far greater threats are that they missed the phone market,
| and are missing the GPU/AI market. Those are entirely new
| markets where growth would happen, instead of the mostly fixed
| size of the current CPU market where the same players are just
| trading small percentage points.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Intel is a product of corporate cancer that is management
| consulting.
| pm90 wrote:
| tbh that applies to all fortune 500 at this point
| tru3_power wrote:
| What does this even mean? (not sarcastic)
| jbm wrote:
| I worked at (American drink company in Japan) previously and
| saw what the poster may be referring to.
|
| Management Consulting sells ideas, many of them silly or not
| important that are marketed and packaged as era-defining. A
| manager who implements #FASHIONABLE_IDEA can look forward to
| upwards mobility, while boring, realistic, business-focused
| ideas from people in the trenches usually get ignored (unless
| you want a lateral transfer to a similar job). hashtag-
| collection-of-ideas is much easier to explain when the time
| comes for the next step up.
|
| This explains why you get insane things like Metaverse
| fashion shows that barely manage to look better than a
| liveleak beheading video. These sorts of things might seem
| like minor distractions, but getting these sorts of
| boondoggles up and running creates stress and drowns out
| other concerns. Once the idea is deployed, the success or
| failure of the idea is of minimal importance, it must be
| /made/ successful so that $important_person can get their
| next job.
|
| These projects starve companies of morale, focus and
| resources. I recall the struggle for a ~USD $20k budget on a
| project to automate internal corporate systems, while some
| consultants received (much) more than 10 times that amount
| for a report that basically wound up in the bin.
|
| Oddly, this sort of corporate supplication to management
| consultants worked out for me (personally). I was a dev who
| wound up as a manager and was able to deliver projects
| internally, while other decent project managers could not get
| budget and wound up looking worse for something that wasn't
| their fault.
|
| I don't think any of the projects brought by management
| consultants really moved the needle in any meaningful way
| while I worked for any BigCos.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Oh the PTSD... *twitch*
| yCombLinks wrote:
| People come in on a short term basis. They don't know the
| company, the business, or the employees. They make long term
| decisions by applying generic and simplified metrics without
| deep understanding.
| topspin wrote:
| "Intel's argument is that backside power will make chips much
| easier to design, since the power is separated from the
| communications layer, eliminating interference"
|
| That makes a lot of sense to me: that's how and why PCBs are
| usually designed as they are. How true it that there is an actual
| advantage vs TSMC?
| mdasen wrote:
| It all depends on timing. TSMC is also working on backside
| power delivery.
|
| Intel's roadmap looks great. However, I'm skeptical of whether
| they're actually meeting that roadmap. Meteor Lake was launched
| last month using Intel 4, but it looks like Intel 4 has lower
| transistor density than TSMC's 5nm. Intel 3 is listed on their
| roadmap as second-half 2023, but we've yet to see any Intel 3
| parts.
|
| Realistically, there won't be too much of an advantage for
| Intel. It's pretty clear that even when Intel ships things,
| they aren't shipping these new nodes in volume. Intel 4 is only
| being used for some laptop processors and they're even using
| TSMC's 5nm and 6nm processes for the graphics and IO on those
| chips. They canceled the desktop version of Meteor Lake so
| desktops are staying on Intel 7 for now. Intel's latest server
| processors launched last month are also Intel 7.
|
| If Intel were able to get a year or two ahead of TSMC, then I
| could see a nice advantage. However, it looks like Intel's a
| year behind its roadmap and even being a year behind they're
| only shipping laptop parts (and not even able to fab the whole
| chip themselves).
|
| But past success/failure doesn't predict the future. Maybe
| Intel will be shipping 20A with backside power in 2024 and
| it'll be 2025 before TSMC gives Apple a 2nm chip with backside
| power.
|
| But given that we haven't seen them shipping Intel 3 and they
| haven't taken Intel 3 off their roadmap, I'm going to be a bit
| skeptical. Intel is doing way better than they had been doing.
| However, I've yet to see something convincing that they're
| doing better than TSMC. That's not to say they aren't going to
| do better than TSMC, but at this point Intel is saying "we're
| going to jump from slightly worse than 5nm (Intel 4) to 2nm in
| a year or less!" Maybe Intel is doing that well, but it's a
| tall ask. TSMC launched 5nm in 2020 and 3 years later got to
| 3nm. It doesn't take as long to catch up because technology
| becomes easier over time, but Intel is kinda claiming it can
| compress 5-6 years worth of work into a single year. Again,
| maybe Intel has been pouring its resources into 20A and 18A and
| maybe some of it is more on ASML and maybe Intel has been
| neglecting Intel 4 and Intel 3 because it knows it's worth
| putting its energy toward something actually better. But it
| also seems reasonable to have a certain amount of doubt about
| Intel's claims.
|
| I'd love for Intel to crush its roadmap. Better processors and
| better competition benefit us all. But I'm still wondering how
| well that will go. TSMC seems to be having a bit of trouble
| with their 3nm process. 2024's flagship Android processors will
| remain on 4nm and it looks like the 2024 Zen 5 processors will
| be 4nm as well (with 3nm parts coming in 2025). So it looks
| like 3nm will basically just be Apple until 2025 which kinda
| indicates that TSMC isn't doing wonderfully with its 3nm
| process. Android processors moved to 5nm around 6 months after
| Apple did, but it looks like they'll move to 3nm around 18
| months after Apple. But just because TSMC isn't doing great at
| 3nm doesn't mean Intel will face similar struggles. It just
| seems likely that if TSMC (a company that has been crushing it
| over the past decade) is facing higher struggles at 3nm, it's a
| bit of wishful thinking to believe Intel won't face similar
| struggles at 3nm and below.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming.
| Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope.
| Core 2 series blew them out of the water. Was ARM really
| competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem
| for Intel is the inertia of laziness due to a lack of
| competition. I wouldn't count them out just yet, however. The
| company's first true swing at modern GPU was actually good for a
| first attempt. Their recent CPUs while not quite as good as Ryzen
| aren't exactly uncompetitive. Their foundry business faltered
| because they were trying a few things never before and not
| because they were incompetent. Also, 20A and 18A are coming
| along. I am not an Intel fan at all. I run AMD and ARM. My
| dislike isn't technological though, it's just that I hate their
| underhanded business practices.
| nine_k wrote:
| ARM has been really competitive since, well, 2007, when the
| first iPhone hit the market, and when Android followed in 2008.
| That is, last 15 years or so. Not noticing a _hugely_ growing
| segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and
| Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could
| call astute.
|
| Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not
| be written off. But they did get themselves into a hole to dig
| out from, and not just because the 5nm process was really hard
| to get working.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing
| insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and
| others involved is not something I could call astute.
|
| And it's not like they didn't notice either. Apple literally
| asked intel to supply the chips for the first iPhone, but the
| intel CEO at the time "didn't see it".
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-
| have-...
| eslaught wrote:
| I agree mobile was a miss but the linked article actually
| quotes Intel's former COE making a pretty good argument why
| they missed:
|
| > "The thing you have to remember is that this was before
| the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone
| would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that
| they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain
| price for and not a nickel more and that price was below
| our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of
| these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight,
| the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what
| anyone thought."
|
| In that circumstance, I think most people would have made
| the same decision.
| epistasis wrote:
| Kind of speaks to how Intel was not competitive in the
| space at all. If it was truly that the marginal cost per
| part was higher than the requested price, either Apple
| was asking for the impossible and settled for a worse
| deal with an ARM chip, or Intel did not have similar
| capabilities.
| isignal wrote:
| Intel also had a later chance when Apple tried to get off
| the Qualcomm percent per handset model. This was far
| after the original iPhone. Apple also got sued for
| allegedly sharing proprietary Qualcomm trade secrets with
| Intel. And Intel still couldn't pull it off despite all
| these tailwinds.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| "We couldn't figure out how much a chip design would cost
| to make" is pretty damning, in my book.
| katbyte wrote:
| I'm not so sure, he made a choice purely on "will it make
| money now" not "well let's take a chance and see if this
| pays of big and if not we'll loose a little money"
|
| It's not like they couldn't afford it and taking chances
| is important
| eslaught wrote:
| Ok, but you have to view this through the lens of what
| was on the market at the time and what kind of
| expectations Intel likely would have had. I can't imagine
| that Apple told Intel what they were planning. Therefore,
| it would have been reasonable to look around at the state
| of what existed at the time (basically, iPods, flip
| phones, and the various struggling efforts that were
| trying to become smartphones at the time) and conclude
| that none of that was going to amount to anything big.
|
| I'm pretty sure most people here panned the iPhone
| _after_ it came out, so it 's not as if anyone would have
| predicted it prior to even being told it existed.
| cpursley wrote:
| > In that circumstance, I think most people would have
| made the same decision.
|
| In that circumstance, I think most _MBAs_ would have made
| the same decision.
|
| Fixed that for you
| xenadu02 wrote:
| And that statement is hilarious in light of the many
| failed efforts (eg subsidies for Netbooks and their
| embedded x86 chip) where they lit billions on fire
| attempting to sway the market.
|
| FWIW I don't buy his explanation anyway. Intel at the
| time had zero desire to be a fab. Their heart was not in
| it. They wanted to own all the IP for fat margins. They
| have yet to prove anything about that has changed despite
| the noise they repeatedly make about taking on fab
| customers.
| distances wrote:
| That was very luck for Apple though. Nokia made deals with
| Intel to provide the CPU for upcoming phone models, and had
| to scramble to redesign them when it became clear Intel was
| unable to deliver.
| finaard wrote:
| Not quite true - the intel projects were at a pretty
| early stage when Elop took over, and the whole Microsoft
| thing happened - and the projects got canned as part of
| the cleanup and moving to Windows for the phones.
|
| The CPUs were indeed horrible, and would've caused a lot
| of pain if the projects had actually continued. (source:
| I was working on the software side for the early Nokia
| intel prototypes)
| distances wrote:
| Thanks for the insights. N9 was originally rumored to use
| Intel, and it was speculated so [1] still half a year
| before the release. Was that then also switched by Elop
| as part of the whole lineup change, or were these rumors
| unfounded in the first place?
|
| [1] https://www.gottabemobile.com/meego-powered-
| nokia-n9-to-laun...
| finaard wrote:
| Pretty much all rumors at that time were very
| entertainingly wrong.
|
| I think at the time that article got published we didn't
| even have the intel devboards distributed (that is a
| screen and macroboards, way before it starts looking like
| a phone). We did have some intel handsets from a 3rd
| party for meego work, but that was pretty much just proof
| of concept - nobody ever really bothered looking into
| trying to get the modem working, for example.
|
| What became the N9 was all the time planned as an arm
| based device - exact name and specs changed a few times,
| but it still pretty much was developed as a maemo device,
| just using the meego name for branding, plus having some
| of the APIs (mainly, qt mobility and QML) compatible with
| what was scheduled to become meego. The QML stuff was a
| late addition there - originally it was supposed to
| launch with MTF, and the device was a wild mix of both
| when it launched, with QML having noticeable issues in
| many areas.
|
| Development on what was supposed to be proper meego (the
| cooperation with intel) happened with only a very small
| team (which I was part of) at that time, and was starting
| to slowly ramp up - but massive developer effort from
| Nokia to actually make a "true" meego phone would've
| started somewhere mid-11.
| distances wrote:
| Very interesting, thanks for setting the record straight!
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > ARM has been really competitive since
|
| And a few years prior to that Intel made the most competitive
| ARM chips (StrongARM). Chances are that an Intel chip would
| have powered the iPhone had they not scrapped their ARM
| division due to "reasons"
| bux93 wrote:
| Intel had purchased/gotten StrongARM from DEC.
|
| DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it
| was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to
| be more energy efficient.
|
| Then, after the success of these ARM chips in the
| blackberry and most of the palm PDAs as well as MP3 players
| and HTC smartphones, Intel sells it off, so it could focus
| on trying to make its big chips more energy efficient,
| making the mistake DEC avoided.
|
| iPhone was a defining moment, but at the time it was
| completely obvious that smartphones would be a thing, it's
| just that people thought that the breakthrough product
| would come from Nokia or Sony-Ericsson (who were using ARM
| SoCs from TI and Quallcomm respectively). Selling off the
| ARM division would not have been my priority?
|
| So it's a string of unforced errors. Nevertheless, Intel
| remains an ARM licensee, they didn't give that up when
| selling StrongARM, so it seems some people still saw the
| future..
| matwood wrote:
| Sounds like the classic Innovators Dilemma. There wasn't
| a lot of margin in the ARM chips so Intel doubled down on
| their high margin server and desktop chips. ARM took over
| the low end in portable devices and is now challenging in
| the datacenter.
| jcheng wrote:
| > DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded
| it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips
| to be more energy efficient.
|
| I thought this was interesting enough to track down more
| of the backstory here, and found this fascinating
| article:
|
| https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text
| /20...
|
| Page 60, hard breaks added for readability:
|
| Baum: Apple owned a big chunk of it, but when Apple was
| really having hard times, they sold off their chunk at
| quite a profit, but they sold off the chunk. And then--
| oh, while Newton was going on, some people from DEC came
| to visit, and they said, "Hey, we were looking at doing a
| low power Alpha and decided that just couldn't be done,
| and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM
| which is really low power, really high performance,
| really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year. Would
| you use that in your Newton?" Cause, you know, we were
| using ARMs in the Newton, and we all kind of went,
| "Phhht, yeah. You can't do it, but, yeah, if you could
| we'd use it."
|
| That was the basis of StrongARM, which became a very
| successful business for DEC. And then DEC sued Intel.
| Well, I worked on the StrongARM 1500, which was a very
| interesting product. It was an ARM and a DSP kind of
| highly combined. It was supposed to be like video
| processing using set top boxes, and things like that. And
| then we finished that project and our group in Palo Alto,
| we were just gonna start an Alpha project.
|
| And just then it was announced that DEC was-- no. No.
| Intel, at that time, Intel, DEC sued Intel for patent
| violations, didn't go to them and say, "Hey, pay up or
| stop using it." They just sued them. Intel was completely
| taken by surprise. There was a settlement. The settlement
| was you have to buy our Microelectronics Division and pay
| us a whole pile of money, and everything will go away.
|
| So they sold the Microelectronics Division, which we were
| part of, except for the Alpha Design Group, 'cause they
| didn't think that they could sell that to Intel and have
| the SEC approve, 'cause the two can conflict. So I went
| away on vacation not knowing whether I would be coming
| back and working for Intel, or coming back working for
| DEC. And it turned out they decided to keep the Alpha
| Design Group, so I was still working for DEC. Except the
| reason for the lawsuit was Compaq wanted to buy DEC, but
| didn't want to buy 'em with this Fab and Microelectronics
| Division. So by doing this, they got rid of the
| Microelectronics Division, and now they could sell
| themselves to Compaq.
| ako wrote:
| Apple has been working with Arm since 1987, when work on the
| Apple Newton started:
| https://www.cpushack.com/2010/10/26/how-the-newton-and-
| arm-s...
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Intel's problem was the cultural and structural issues in their
| organization, plus their decision to bet on strong OEM partner
| relationships to beat competition. This weakness would prevent
| them from being ready for any serious threat and is what they
| should've seen coming.
| duped wrote:
| > Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel
| crushed them.
|
| Intel never "crushed" ARM. Intel completely failed to develop a
| mobile processor and ARM has a massive marketshare there.
|
| ARM has always beaten the crap out of Intel at performance per
| watt, which turned out to be extremely important both in mobile
| and data center scale.
| hollerith wrote:
| I got curious about how ARM is doing in the data center and
| found this:
|
| >Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing
| market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its
| increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to
| TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom
| Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021.
|
| https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-
| data-...
| chasil wrote:
| The Amazon Graviton started by using stock ARM A72 cores.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Oracle, and even Microsoft, have decently large arm64
| deployments now too (compared to nothing).
| dijit wrote:
| ARM would be even more popular in the datacenter if getting
| access to Ampere CPUs was possible.
|
| I can get a top of the line Xeon Gold basically next day
| with a incredibly high quality out of band management from
| a reputable server provider. (HP, Dell).
|
| Ampere? Give it 6 months, EUR5,000 and _maybe_ you can get
| one, from Gigabyte. Not known for server quality.
|
| (yes, I'm salty, I have 4 of these CPUs and it took a
| really long time to get them while costing just as much as
| AMD EPYC Milan's).
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| ARM server CPUs are great, I'd move all of our stuff to
| them once more competition happens. Give it a few more
| years.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| You can get them on Oracle cloud servers for whatever you
| choose to do, last i looked and used them.
| touisteur wrote:
| HPE has an Ampere server line that is quite good,
| especially considering TCO, density, and the IO it can
| pack. But yeah you'll have to fork some cash.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm using Ampere powered servers on Oracle cloud and boy,
| they're snappy, even with the virtualization layer on
| top.
|
| Amazon has its own ARM CPUs on AWS, and you can get them
| on demand, too.
|
| Xeons and EPYCs are great for "big loads", however some
| supercomputer centers also started to install
| "experimental" ARM partitions.
|
| The future is bright not because Intel is floundering,
| but there'll be at least three big CPU producers (ARM,
| AMD and Intel).
|
| Also, don't have prejudices about "brands". most
| motherboard brands can design server-class hardware if
| they wish. They're just making different trade-offs
| because of the market they're in.
|
| I used servers which randomly fried parts of their
| motherboard when see some "real" load. Coming one morning
| and having no connectivity because a top of the line 2
| port gigabit onboard Ethernet fried itself on a top of
| the line, flagship server is funny in its own way.
| finaard wrote:
| Since roughly the first year of covid the supply
| generally has been quite bad. Yes, I can get _some_ xeon
| or epyc from HPE quickly, but if I care about specific
| specs it's also a several month long wait. For midsized
| servers (up to about 100 total threads) AMD still doesn't
| really have competition if you look at price, performance
| and power - I'm currently waiting for such a machine, the
| intel option would've been 30% more expensive at worse
| specs.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| It'll probably get get there, but it'll probably be a slow
| migration. After all, no point in tossing out all the Xeon
| that still have a few years left in them. But I believe
| Google is now also talking about or is already working on
| their own custom chip similar to Graviton now. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/google_prepares_
| its_o...
| matwood wrote:
| > Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton
| chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021
|
| I'm guessing this has increased since 2021. I've moved the
| majority of our AWS workloads to ARM because the price
| savings (it mostly 'just works'). If companies are starting
| to tighten their belts, this could accelerate even more ARM
| adoption.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Intel never "crushed" ARM.
|
| They certainly tried selling their chips below cost to move
| into markets ARM dominated, but "contra revenue" couldn't
| save them.
|
| > Intel Corp.'s Contra-Revenue Strategy Was a Huge Waste of
| Money
|
| https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/21/intel-
| corp...
| offices wrote:
| The name they chose to try and make it not sound like anti-
| competitive practices just makes it sound like Iran-Contra
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > Where was AMD?
|
| Trying to breathe as Intel was pushing their head under water.
|
| We saw AMD come back after their lawsuit against Intel got
| through and Intel had to stop paying everyone to not use AMD.
| mjevans wrote:
| Kind of, but not really in laptops :( they're doing great on
| handhelds though.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think they're doing better (disclaimer: writing this from
| a Ryzen laptop) and their latest chip has better thermals
| and consumption, with a decent reputation compared to 10
| years ago for instance. But yes, it's a long road ahead.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| > Core 2 series blew them out of the water.
|
| And Sandy Bridge all but assured AMD wouldn't be relevant for
| the better part of a decade.
|
| It's easy to forget just how fast Sandy Bridge was when it came
| out; over 12 years later and it can still hold its own as far
| as raw performance is concerned.
| chasil wrote:
| Intel's flaw was trying to push DUV to 10nm (otherwise known as
| Intel 7).
|
| Had Intel adopted the molten tin of EUV, the cycle of failure
| would have been curtailed.
|
| Hats off to SMIC for the DUV 7nm which they produced so
| quickly. They likely saw quite a bit of failed effort.
|
| And before we discount ARM, we should remember that Acorn
| produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386
| was years later, with 275k transistors.
|
| Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti.
|
| That's a lot of mistakes, not even counting Itanium.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Acorn's original ARM chip was impressive but it didn't really
| capture much market share. The first ARM CPU competed against
| the 286, and did win. The 386 was a big deal though. First,
| software was very expensive at the time, and the 386 allowed
| people to keep their investments. Second, it really was a
| powerful chip. It allowed 11mips vs ARM3's 13, but the 486
| achieved 54mips. ARM6 only hit 28mips. It's worth noting that
| the 386 also used 32bit memory addressing and a 32 bit bus
| while ARM was 26bit addressing with a 16 bit bus.
| chasil wrote:
| At the same time, it had unquestioned performance dominance
| until ARM made the decision for embedded.
|
| ARM would have been much more influential under Intel,
| rather than pursuing the i960 or the iAPX 432.
|
| Just imagine Intel ARM Archimedes. It would have crushed
| the IBM PS/2.
|
| Whoops.
|
| Seriously, even DEC was smart enough.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
| kens wrote:
| > Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count.
| The 80386 was years later, with 275k transistors
|
| Coincidentally, ARM1 and 80386 were both introduced in 1985.
| I'm a big fan of the ARM1 but I should point out that the 386
| is at a different level, designed for multitasking operating
| systems and including a memory management unit for paging.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti.
|
| Intel had StrongARM though. IIRC they made best ARM cpus in
| the early 2000s and were designing their own cores. Then
| Intel decided to get rid of it because obviously they were
| just wasting money and could design a better x86 mobile
| chip...
| cherryteastain wrote:
| N7, TSMC's competitor to Intel 7, does not use EUV either.
| Sakos wrote:
| There are multiple versions of N7. The N7 and N7P are DUV
| while the N7+ is EUV.
| mdasen wrote:
| The curse of having weak enemies is that you become complacent.
|
| You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long
| time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's
| the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start
| thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something
| 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and
| your competitors are so far behind that it doesn't matter?
|
| It's not that Intel should have seen AMD coming or should have
| seen ARM coming. It's that Intel should have understood that
| just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you
| have an unassailable castle. Intel should have been smart
| enough to understand that backing off of R&D would mean giving
| up the moat they'd created. Even if it looked like no one was
| coming for their crown at the moment, you need to understand
| that disinvestment doesn't get rewarded over the long-run.
|
| Intel should have understood that trying to be cheap about R&D
| and extract as much money from customers wasn't a long-term
| strategy. It wasn't the strategy that built them into the
| dominant Intel we knew. It wouldn't keep them as that dominant
| Intel.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> It 's that Intel should have understood that just because
| you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an
| unassailable castle._
|
| Their third employee that later went on to become their third
| CEO and guide Intel from the memory to processor transition
| literally coined the term and wrote a book called "Only the
| Paranoid Survive" [1]. It's inexcusable that management
| degraded that much.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paran
| oid...
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Yes, I agree. However, I don't necessarily see this book
| title as an imperative to innovate. Patent trolling can
| also be a way to deal with competitors.
|
| After all, Apple and ARM came from the idea to have better
| end user products around softer factors than shear CPU
| power. Since Intel's products aren't highly integrated
| Phones nor assembled computer, Intel had no stake directly.
|
| It is complex.
| IndrekR wrote:
| Apple came from recreational "there is now a 10 times
| cheaper CPU than anything else and I can afford to build
| my video terminal into real computer in my bedroom" and
| "maybe we can actually sell it?". [1]
|
| ARM literally came from "we need a much better and faster
| processor" and "how hard can this be?" [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1
| 971%E2%...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family
| llamaLord wrote:
| To be fair, they should have seen Ryzen coming, any long-term
| AMD user knew years before Ryzen landed that it was going to
| be a good core because AMD were very vocal about how badly
| wrong they bet with Bulldozer (previous core family).
|
| AMD bet BIG on the software industry leaning in heavily on
| massive thread-counts over high throughput, single-threaded
| usage... But it never happened so the cores tanked.
|
| It was never a secret WHY that generation of core sucked, and
| it was relatively clear what AMD needed to do to fix the
| problem, and they were VERY vocal about "doing the thing"
| once it became clear their bet wasn't paying off.
| bmer wrote:
| (I'm curious about this story, as I am unfamiliar with it.)
|
| Why did that generation of core (Bulldozer) suck?
|
| What was it that AMD needed to do to fix the problem?
|
| (Links to relevant stories would be sufficient for me!)
| Macha wrote:
| Chips and Cheese has probably the most in depth publicly
| available dive for the tech reasons why Bulldozer was the
| way it was:
|
| https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/22/bulldozer-amds-
| crash-m...
|
| https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/24/bulldozer-amds-
| crash-m...
|
| ---
|
| From a consumer perspective, Bulldozer and revisions as
| compared to Skylake and revisions were:
|
| + comparable on highly multi-threaded loads
|
| + cheaper
|
| - significantly behind on less multi-threaded loads
|
| - had 1 set of FPUs per 2 cores, so workloads with lots
| of floating point calculations were also weaker
|
| - Most intensive consumer software was single or a very
| small number of thread focused still (this was also a
| problem for Intel in trying to get people to buy more
| expensive i7s/i9s over i5s in those days)
| bonton89 wrote:
| There's been lots written about this but this is my
| opinion.
|
| Bulldozer seemed to be designed under the assumption
| heavy floating point work would be done on the GPU (APU)
| which all early construction cores had built in. But no
| one is going to rewrite all of their software to take
| advantage of the iGPU that isn't present in existing CPUs
| and isn't present in the majority of CPUs (Intel) so it
| sort of smelt like Intel's itantic moment, only worse.
|
| I think they were desperate to see some near term return
| on the money they spent on buying ATI. ATI wasn't a bad
| idea for a purchase but they seemed to heavily overpay
| for it which probably really clouded management's
| judgement.
| King1st wrote:
| The Bulldozer design had a few main issues.
|
| 1.Bulldozer had a very long pipeline akin to a Pentium 4.
| This allows for highclocks but comparatively little work
| being done per cycle vs their competition. Since clocks
| have a ceiling around 5GHz they could never push the
| clocks high enough to compete with intel. 2.They used a
| odd core design with 1 FPU for every 2 integer unit
| instead of the normal 1:1 that we have seen on every x86
| since the i486. This leads to very weak FPU performance
| needed for many professional applications. Conversely it
| allowed for very competitive performance on highly
| threaded integer applications like rendering. This
| decision was probably under the assumption APUs would
| integrate their GPUs better and software would be written
| with it in mind since a GPU easily out does a CPUs FPU
| but it requires more programming. This didn't come to be.
| 3. They were stuck using Global Foundries due to previous
| contracts when they spun it off requiring AMD use GloFlo.
| This became a anchor as Gloflo fell behind market
| competitors like TSMC. Leaving AMD stuck on 32nm for a
| long while, until gloflo got 14nm and eventually AMD got
| out of the contract between zen 1-2.
|
| bonus: Many IC designers have bemoaned how much of
| bulldozers design was automated with little hand
| modifications which tends to lead to a less optimized
| design. 3. 3.
| StuffMaster wrote:
| I thought it was a bad idea when I first read of it. It
| reminded me of Intel's Netburst (Pentium 4) architecture.
| baq wrote:
| They've seen all that. You don't have to have an MBA or a
| MIT degree to plot projected performance of your or your
| competitors' chips.
|
| It was process failures. Their fabs couldn't fab the
| designs. Tiger lake was what? 4 years late?
| nox101 wrote:
| This sounds like Google. Some bean counter is firing people
| left and right and somehow they think that's going to save
| them from the fact that AI answers destroy their business
| model. They need more people finding solutions, not less.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| If you're process nodes are going wayyyy over schedule, it
| shouldn't take much intelligence to realize that TSMC is
| catching up FAST.
|
| You should probably have some intel (haha) on ARM and AMD
| chips. They didn't care.
|
| Why? It's monopoly business tactics, except they didn't realize
| they weren't Microsoft.
|
| It's not like this was overnight. Intel should have watched AMD
| like a hawk after that slimeball Ruiz was deposed and a real
| CEO put in charge.
|
| And the Mac chips have been out, what, two years now, and the
| Apple processors on the iPhones at least 10?
|
| Come on. This is apocalyptic scale incompetence.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Microsoft also got its lunch ate during this time by mobile.
| They have a new CEO who's had to work hard to reshape the
| place as a services company.
| scrubs wrote:
| Well, yes.
|
| Look at Japan generally and Toyota specifically. In Japan the
| best award you can get for having an outstanding company in
| terms of profit, topline, quality, free-cash, people, and all
| the good measures is the Deming Award. Deming was our guy (an
| American) but we Americans in management didn't take him
| seriously enough.
|
| The Japanese to their credit did ... ran with it and made it
| into their own thing in a good way. The Japanese took 30% of
| the US auto market in our own backyard. Customers knew Hondas,
| Toyotas cost more but were worth every dollar. They resold
| better too. (Yes some noise about direct government investment
| in Japanese companies by the government was a factor too, but
| not the chief factor in the long run).
|
| We Americans got it "explained to us." We thought we were
| handling it. Nah, it was BS. But we eventually got our act
| together. Our Deming award is the Malcolm Baldridge award.
|
| Today, unfortunately the Japanese economy isn't rocking like it
| was the 80s and early 90s. And Toyota isn't the towering
| example of quality it once was. I think -- if my facts are
| correct --- they went too McDonalds and got caught up in
| lowering price in their materials, and supply chain with bad
| effects net overall.
|
| So things ebb and flow.
|
| The key thing: is management through action or inaction
| allowing stupid inbred company culture to make crappy products?
| Do they know their customers etc etc. Hell, mistakes even
| screw-ups are not life ending for companies the size of Intel.
| But recurring stupidity is. A lot of the times the good guys
| allow themselves to rot from the inside out. So when is enough
| enough already?
| chx wrote:
| > Where was AMD?
|
| Crushed by Intel's illegal anticompetitive antics?
| treffer wrote:
| The problem is this... The money cow is datacenters, and
| especially top of the line products where there is no
| competition.
|
| Then fastest single core and multi core x86 cpus that money can
| buy will go to databases and similar vertically scaled systems.
|
| That's where you can put up the most extreme margins. It's
| "winner takes all the margins". Beeing somewhat competitive,
| but mostly a bit worse is the worst business position. Also...
|
| I put money on AMD when they were taking over the crown.
|
| Thank you for this wakeup call, I'll watch closely if Intel can
| deliver on this and take it back. I'll habe to adjust
| accordingly.
| klelatti wrote:
| > Nope. Intel crushed them.
|
| The problem is that Intel has had a defensive strategy for a
| long time. Yes, they crushed many attempts to breach the x86
| moat but failed completely and then gave up attempts to reach
| beyond that moat. Mobile, foundry, GPUs etc have all seen half-
| hearted or doomed attempts (plus some bizarre attempts to
| diversify - McAfee!).
|
| I think that, as Ben essentially says, they put too much faith
| in never-ending process leadership and the ongoing supremacy of
| x86. And when that came to an end the moat was dry.
| baq wrote:
| On the contrary, they tried to pivot so many times and enter
| different markets, they bought countless small companies,
| some big, nothing seemed to stick except the core CPU and
| datacenter businesses. IIRC mobileye is one somewhat
| successful venture.
| klelatti wrote:
| Except they weren't real pivots. Mobile / GPU were x86
| centric, foundry half hearted without buying into what
| needed to be done. Buying a company is the easy bit.
| bonton89 wrote:
| Part of the problem is Intel is addicted to huge margins.
| Maybe of the areas they have tried to enter are almost
| commodity products in comparison so it would take some strong
| leadership to convince everyone to back off those margins for
| the sake of diversification.
|
| They should have been worried about their process leadership
| for a long time. IIRC even the vaunted 14nm that they ended
| up living on for so long was pretty late. That would have had
| me making backup plans for 10nm but it looked more like
| leadership just went back to the denial well for years
| instead. It seemed like they didn't start backport designs
| until after Zen1 launched to me.
| klelatti wrote:
| 100%! Also in a way reversing what Moore/Grove did when
| they abandoned commodity memories. Such a hard thing to do.
| jldugger wrote:
| > Was ARM really competitive until recently?
|
| The writing was on the wall 6 years ago; Intel was not doing
| well in mobile and it was only a matter of time until that tech
| improved. Same as Intel unseating the datacenter chips before
| it. Ryzen I will give you is a surprise, but in a healthy
| competive market, "the competition outengineered us this time"
| _should_ be a potential outcome.
|
| IMO the interesting question is basically whether Intel could
| have done anything differently. Clay Christianson's sustaining
| vs disrupting innovation model is well known in industry, and
| ARM slowly moving up the value chain is obvious in that
| framework. Stratechery says they should have opened up their
| fabs to competitors, but how does that work?
| p_l wrote:
| Previously, wverytine competition managed to out engineer
| intel, they crushed them either by having spare process
| advantage they could use to brute force performance... Or
| lock competition out of markets by blocking large swathes of
| them through illegal deals.
| ActionHank wrote:
| They should have known it was coming because of how many people
| they were losing to AMD, but there is a blindness in big corps
| when management decide they are the domain experts and the
| workers are replaceable.
| epolanski wrote:
| > Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen?
|
| No, but ARM should've rung many bells.
|
| Intel poured tons of billions in mobile.
|
| Didn't understood the future from smartphones to servers was
| about power efficiency and scale.
|
| Eventually their lack of power efficiency made them lose ground
| in all their core business. I hope they will get this back and
| not just by competing on manufacturing but architecture too.
| vdaea wrote:
| Intel's recent CPUs are not as good as Ryzen? That hasn't been
| correct for a few years now.
| djmips wrote:
| Only the Paranoid Survive
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| AMD had Jim Keller join them, that should have been a wake up
| call for Intel.
| ken47 wrote:
| This reminds me of the situation at Boeing, albeit w/ less fatal
| consequences. For a long time, it's been a company that has
| focused on maximizing profits through "innovative" business
| practices, first and foremost, rather than innovative R&D. It's
| completely unsurprising that Intel has been struggling lately
| against its genuinely inventive competition.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I was a huge Intel fanboy for years...and then I got my first
| Windows Arm laptop (Lenovo X13s). Intel has a lot of catching up
| to do.
| StillBored wrote:
| I take that to mean you haven't tried any recent (zen3/4 U
| series) AMD laptops then, or for that matter the M1/2/3's. I've
| heard this from a number of people who are comparing the x13s
| or new mac's with their 14nm intel that has a discrete nvidia
| gpu (which is eating another 10W+) from 2017/8 or so.
|
| I have a pile of laptops including the x13s, and that part
| burns a good ~30W for a couple minutes, while running ~30% (or
| worse) slower, then thermally throttles and drops another ~30%
| in performance.
|
| For light browsing it manages to stay under 5W and gets 10h
| from its 50Wh battery. This is also doable on just about any
| AMD or Mac laptop. The AMD machine I'm typing this on tells me
| I have more than 12 hours remaining and i'm sitting at 81%
| battery (67Wh). And this machine is a good 3x faster compiling
| code, or running simple benchmarks like speedometer when its
| plugged in or allowed to burn 35W. Except it also has a fan
| that turns on when its under heavy load to keep it from
| thermally throttling.
|
| Yes the x13s is cute, it is a thin/light laptop and is probably
| the first windows on arm machine that isn't completely
| unusable. But, its going to take another leap or two to catch-
| up with current top of the line machines.
|
| Everyone loves geekbench so, here is an obviously unthrottled
| x13s vs a similarly rated 28W AMD 7840U.
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/21596449
| https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-7840u
|
| That Amd is 2x the single threaded perf, and 50% faster
| multithreaded, and anything graphics related is going to look
| even worse.
| wolfspider wrote:
| My own humble opinion is that Intel has always suffered from
| market cannibalization. They are a brand I look for but many
| times the iteration of products will force me to go a generation
| or two older because I can't argue with the price and features.
| By the time I was sold on a NUC they were discontinued. I wanted
| a discrete GPU when they announced Xe but it has become Xe ARC
| alchemist, battlemage, celestial, and druid. By the time I'm
| ready to spend some money it will become something else usually.
| Also, they should have snapped up Nuvia. I'm still rooting for
| them but really if they could streamline their products and be
| willing to take a leap of faith on others in the same space it
| would help out a lot.
| rudedogg wrote:
| I felt that way about their Optane persistent RAM memory
| (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-finally-
| announ...).
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| >I wanted a discrete GPU when they announced Xe but it has
| become Xe ARC alchemist, battlemage, celestial, and druid.
|
| They've made this situation fairly clear, in my eyes.
|
| Alchemist is the product line for their first attempt at true
| dedicated GPUs like those Nvidia and AMD produce. It's based on
| Intel Xe GPU architecture.
|
| It's done decently well, and they've been very diligent about
| driver updates.
|
| Battlemage is the next architecture that will replace it when
| it's ready, which I believe was targeted for this year. Similar
| to how the Nvidia 4k series replaced the 3k before it.
| Celestial comes a couple years later, then druid a couple years
| after that, etc. They don't exist simultaneously, they're just
| the names they use for generations of their GPUs.
| kbutler wrote:
| Andy Grove's philosophy was "Only the paranoid survive". Intel
| seemed to rest on its laurels, divesting ARM, casually developing
| casual GPUs, and being complacent about their biggest direct
| competitor.
|
| They needed (and need) a lot more paranoia.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Off topic but I find it weird that Intel CEO does so much
| religious quoting under the Intel corporate logo:
|
| Here's one examples but there's a pile of them.
|
| https://twitter.com/PGelsinger/status/1751653865009631584
|
| I guess Intel does need the help of a higher power at the stage.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Almost as if "doing the right thing" requires an underlying
| moral framework.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I' not sure I would agree that you need any sort of "moral
| framework" to know how to do the right thing, such as
| religion.
|
| Knowing how to do the right thing is simple human decency.
| bpt3 wrote:
| That's not under the Intel corporate logo. It's a personal
| account. His comments aren't my cup of tea but they certainly
| aren't generally offensive.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > I thought that Krzanich should do something similar: Intel
| should stop focusing its efforts on being an integrated device
| manufacturer (IDM) -- a company that both designed and
| manufactured its own chips exclusively -- and shift to becoming a
| foundry that also served external customers.
|
| That would only work if Intel has a competitive foundry. Intel
| produces very high margin chips. Can it be competitive with TSMC
| in low margin chips where costs must be controlled?
|
| The rumors I've heard (not sure about their credibility) is that
| Intel is simply not competitive in terms of costs and yields.
|
| And that's even before considering it doesn't really have an
| effective process competitive with TSMC.
|
| It's easy to say it should become a foundry, it's much harder to
| actually do that.
| mjevans wrote:
| Wasn't the region around 12-7nM around where flash and RAM style
| memory were more reliable? If the new process works well for
| those but is cheaper that could be very good for bulk (value
| focused) non-volatile and volatile memory.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Intel: The Boeing of semiconductors
| ycsux wrote:
| Boycott Intel
| koshergweilo wrote:
| Why
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Israeli fabs?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Good. Evolution! Competition still works and regulatory capture
| can't help every corp.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Intel is just like Boeing: A company with legendary engineering
| roots taken over by myopic financial engineers who can't think
| further than next quarters stock price, which is their only
| measure, their only target, and to which all their bonuses are
| attached.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Good analogy.
| kaliqt wrote:
| Funnily enough, this is EXACTLY what has happened to the video
| game and movie/series industry.
|
| They jump onto the latest trend, e.g. ESG to get in good with
| the banks and funds without thinking about what long term
| damage it is doing to their brands and products.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| To be fair, they jump on that particular trend because the
| banks will punish them if they don't. They have tens of
| trillions in assets under their management and they make sure
| that capital won't flow to companies that refuse their
| agenda. In effect the banks dictate the direction society
| moves towards. And people say it's a conspiracy theory.
|
| > ESG investment funds in the United States saw capital
| inflows of $3.1 billion in 2022 while non-ESG investment
| funds saw capital outflows of $370 billion during the stock
| market decline that year
| rpmisms wrote:
| It's not a conspiracy theory if it's on their website...
| rpmisms wrote:
| While it's sad now, I'm looking forward to long-term thinking
| being emphasized in business school again.
| rectang wrote:
| Why would people pay attention even if long-term thinking is
| taught? Only chumps think about the long-term interest of the
| _company_. Your long-term interest as an _individual_ is in
| extracting as much money from short-term bonuses as possible,
| because once that money is in your bank account it doesn 't
| matter if the company craters.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Well, the idea of giving value to society has been
| evaporating of late, but it should still be taught as the
| ideal.
| runeblaze wrote:
| I am still trying to maximize my promo chances and that has
| been very hard. Long term thinking -- that's like rocket
| science
| markus_zhang wrote:
| They all look like that, aren't they? It's like cancer, late
| stage. It's everywhere. I'm trying to be optimistic here, but I
| don't see much light at the end of the tunnel. Best case a
| second depression wipes away everyone's wealth and we start
| from clean slate.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I mean, clearly the competitors eating Intel's lunch do not
| look like that. Nvidia does not look like it. Apple doesn't.
| AMD doesn't. Just seems like ordinary competitive churn in
| the marketplace to me.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| That's a pretty good point.
| borissk wrote:
| And furthermore they lost most of their best engineers and
| scientists during the years that the company was run by the
| useless MBAs. Now each new technology process is a huge
| struggle. Intel has secured some of the first new gen EUV
| machines from ASML, but if they'll have the talent to quickly
| start using them on scale is not yet clear.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Somebody from Intel who had a PhD from my school and manages
| a bunch of process engineers was on sabbatical and teaching a
| class at his old department, some of whose undergrads I
| taught. I visited an info session he was presenting and
| pointed out that I had been a green badge in JF5 for
| Validation and that they had a reputation of not matching
| ASML and Nvidia offers. He went ballistic on me and told me
| to go work for them if I got an offer from them and that he
| wouldn't want me on his team with that attitude. While I am
| sure all the other people in the room who were F1s and
| undergrads still wanted jobs and he answered their questions
| honestly as far as I could tell (saying Intel would be
| bankrupt without CHIPS act money etc) that can't have been a
| good look for him. I did leave the room only after telling
| him I wanted his company to succeed.
| borissk wrote:
| You're right - this is another problem for Intel. They have
| a reputation for underpaying engineers, so the best and the
| brightest go elsewhere.
| kortilla wrote:
| This is oversimplified and actually underplays how serious the
| issue is.
|
| These companies didn't fail because of myopic financial
| engineers. The ones focused on quarter to quarter tend to bomb
| the company relatively quickly and do get flushed out.
|
| These companies failed because of long term financial
| visionaries. These are the worst because they are thinking
| about how the company can capture markets at all costs,
| diversify into all adjacent markets, etc. They are a hard
| cancer to purge because on the surface they don't sacrifice
| stuff for the current quarter. They sacrifice laser focus for
| broad but shallow approaches to all kinds of things.
|
| "Sure, we'll build a fab here. And we'll also do enterprise
| NICs... And also storage... and also virtualization... and also
| AI... and also acquire some startups in these fields that might
| have something interesting..."
|
| The company becomes big listless monster coasting on way too
| many bets spread out all over the place. There is no core
| engineering mission or clear boundary between what is the
| business and what isn't.
|
| Intel is far from "myopic". If it was something as obvious as a
| next quarter driven CEO, the board would have made a change
| immediately.
| mmaunder wrote:
| > These companies failed because of long term financial
| visionaries. These are the worst because they are thinking
| about how the company can capture markets at all costs,
| diversify into all adjacent markets, etc.
|
| Long term financial visionaries? No they're simply plundering
| the business to reward shareholders and executives through
| buybacks and dividends. They rationalize this as "maximizing
| shareholder value" but it is destroying long term value,
| growth and innovation.
| kortilla wrote:
| Don't be naive. You missed the entire point of what I
| highlighted and looking for "dividends and buybacks" as
| your signal will lead you nowhere.
|
| CEOs not focused on product vision who focus on "company
| growth" as a vague vision are what lead to Intel, GE, etc.
| There is no greedy raiding of the coffers like your
| caricature implies in this scenarios.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Jeez it seems every thread on HN these days ends in a
| personal attack.
|
| Here's an article unpacking the financialization at
| Intel. The good stuff is about halfway down.
|
| https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-
| intel-fi...
| tgtweak wrote:
| I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many
| process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in
| being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which
| is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d.
|
| Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until
| Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels
| of R&D failure. What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge
| funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying
| healthy dividends due to cost cutting and "coasting". This sudden
| shock of "we're going to invest everything in R&D and catch back
| up" was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn't want to
| hear. They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind.
|
| Intel's 18A is roughly 6 months ahead of schedule, set to begin
| manufacturing in the latter half of 2024. Most accounts put this
| ahead of TSMC's equivalent N2 node...
|
| Fab investments have a 3 year lag on delivering value. We're only
| starting to see the effect of putting serious capital and focus
| on this, as of this year. I also think we'll see more companies
| getting smart about having all of their fabrication eggs in one
| of two baskets (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius
| circle in the south china sea.
|
| Intel has had 4 years of technical debt on it's fabrication side,
| negative stock pressure from the vacuum created by AMD and
| Nvidia, and is still managing to be profitable.
|
| I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the
| towel in on the one company that has quite a lot to gain at this
| point after losing a disproportionate amount of share value and
| market.
|
| I just hope they keep Pat at the helm for another 2 years to
| fully deliver on his strategy or Intel will continue where it was
| headed 4 years ago.
| SchumerGrift wrote:
| > They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have
| made some earnest headway in being an actual fab.
|
| I'd buy this if they'd actually built a fab, but right now this
| seems too-little, too-late for a producer's economy.
|
| The rest frankly doesn't matter much. Intel processors are only
| notable in small sections of the market.
|
| And frankly--as counter-intuitive as this may seem to such an
| investor-bullish forum--the death knell was the government chip
| subsidy. I simply can't imagine american government and private
| enterprise collaborating to produce anything useful in 2024,
| especially when the federal government has shown such a deep
| disinterest in holding the private economy culpable to any kind
| of commitment. Why would intel bother?
| mcint wrote:
| I appreciate the deep cut. I definitely do not follow companies
| internally closely enough to see this coming.
|
| > (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the
| south china sea.
|
| Within 500 mile radius of great power competitor, perhaps. The
| closest points on mainland Taiwan and Korea are 700 miles
| apart. Fabs about 1000 miles, by my loose reckoning.
| hencoappel wrote:
| A 500 mile radius circle has a diameter of 1000 miles, so
| you're both correct.
| dur-randir wrote:
| >have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab
|
| In the terms of end product - not really. Last 3-4 gens are
| indistinguishable to the end user. It's a combined effect of
| marketing failure and really underwhelming gains - when
| marketing screams "breakthrough gen", but what you get is
| +2%/ST perf for another *Lake, you can't sell it.
|
| They might've built a foundation and that might be a deliberate
| tactics to get back into the race, we'll see. But i'm not
| convinced for now.
| 14u2c wrote:
| What you quoted refers to Intel's efforts to act as a fab for
| external customers.
| paulmd wrote:
| raptor lake is the same as coffee lake/comet lake? nah
| TechnicalVault wrote:
| Depends who your user is. From a desktop side you're probably
| not going to notice because desktop CPU requirements have
| been stagnant for years, desktop is all about GPU. On the
| server side Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids is Intel
| getting back in the game and the game is power and market
| share.
|
| See there's only 2 or 3 more obvious generations of obvious
| die shrinks available. Beyond those generations we'll have to
| innovate some other way, so whoever grabs the fab market for
| these modes now gets a longer period to enjoy the fruits of
| their innovation.
|
| Meanwhile server CPU TDPs are hitting the 400W+ mark and DC
| owners are looking dubiously at big copper busbars, die
| shrinks tend to reduce the Watts per Calculation so they're
| appealing. In the current power market, more efficient
| computing translates into actual savings on your power bill.
| There's still demand for better processors, even if we are
| sweating those assets for 5-7 years now.
| RCitronsBroker wrote:
| i honestly don't see what you are seeing in terms of taiwans
| future sovereignty. Of course, China would like to do something
| about Taiwan, especially now with their economy kind of in the
| dumps and a collapsing real estate bubble. But when you look at
| the facts of it all, there's absolut ZERO chance chine can
| muster up what it takes to hold their own in such a conflict.
| Their military isn't up to snuff and they are one broken dam
| away from a huge mass casualty event.
| riffraff wrote:
| I think "economy in the dumps" is a bit too harsh.
|
| China is facing a deflating real estate bubble, but they
| still managed to grow the last year (official sources are
| disputed but independent estimates are still positive).
| RCitronsBroker wrote:
| it's where the growth is coming from. Chinas growth (or
| even just sustenance) isn't coming from a healthy job
| market and consumer spending. It's mostly fueled by SOEs
| and prefectures going into debt to keep on investing, many
| local administration have found out they can trick debt
| limits by forming state-owned special purpose vehicles that
| aren't bound to their debt limits. That's not good at all.
| there's a reason we are seeing tons of novel Chinese car
| brands being pushed here in Europe, they massively
| overproduced and cannot sell them in their own market
| anymore. It's really not looking great atm.
|
| edit: one also should keep in mind that the Chinese real
| estate market is entirely different in its importance to
| its populations wealth. "Buying" real estate is pretty much
| the only sanctioned market to invest your earnings. They
| still pretend to be communist after all.
| MR4D wrote:
| I would refer you to these to take the counterpoint to your
| position [1][2] [3].
|
| China is in a world of hurt, but the government is trying
| desperately to hide how bad it actually is. If this
| continues for a few more months, it will be an existential
| situation for their economy.
|
| [1] -
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-
| hom...
|
| [2] -
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-
| sto...
|
| [3] - https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-
| economics/foreign-direct...
| rapsey wrote:
| > there's absolut ZERO chance chine can muster up what it
| takes to hold their own in such a conflict.
|
| However China is now a full fledged dictatorship. I'm not
| sure you can count on them being a rational actor on the
| world stage.
|
| They can do a lot of damage, but would also get absolutely
| devastated in return. They are food, energy insecure and
| entirely dependent on exports after all.
| RCitronsBroker wrote:
| True, but the elite class that's currently profiting from
| and in control of said country would devastate themselves
| if they dare. Skepticism about the wests self-inflicted
| dependency on China is at an all time high. Terms like
| "on-" or "friend-shoring" are already coming up now.
|
| You're not wrong, maybe all the scaremongering in the west
| about China overtaking us got them delusional enough in a
| Japanese nationalist type way for them to behave this
| irrational, but i highly doubt it. But that can also change
| pretty quick if they feel like their back is against the
| wall, you're not wrong in that regard
| rapsey wrote:
| How much is that elite independent of Xi? A relatively
| independent elite is probably a more stable system. But a
| completely subservient elite to the fearless leader is
| however much more dangerous.
| RCitronsBroker wrote:
| I don't think Xi is as independent as you believe, but
| that's a matter of personal opinion.
|
| I just don't think it's very likely for just about any
| leader putting themselves into the position you are
| describing. This is a reoccurring narrative in western
| media, and I'm not here to defend dictators, but i feel
| like reality is less black and white than that.
|
| Many of the "crazed leaders" we are told are acting
| irrational, often do not. It's just a very, very
| different perspective, often bad ones, but regardless.
|
| Let me try to explain what I mean: during the Iraq war,
| Saddam Hussein was painted as this sort of crazed leader,
| irrationally deciding to invade Kuwait. But that's not
| the entire truth. Hussein may have been an evil man, but
| the way the borders of Iraq were re-drawn, Iraq was
| completely cut off from any sources of fresh water. As
| expected, their neighbors cut off their already wonky
| water supplies and famine followed. One can still think
| it's not justified to invade Kuwait over this, but
| there's a clear gain to be had from this "irrational"
| act. Again, not a statement of personal opinion, just
| that there IS something to be had. I'm not trying to say
| that i am certain that Hussein had the prosperity of his
| people at heart, but i do think that it isn't entirely
| irrational to acknowledge that every country in human
| history is 3 missed meals away from revolution. That's
| not good, even if you are their benevolent god and
| dictator for lifetime(tm).
|
| Russia "irrationally" invading the Ukraine may seem that
| way to us, but let's see. Russias economy is just about
| entirely dependent on their petrochem industry. Without,
| their are broke. The reason why they still can compete in
| this market is their asset of soviet infrastructure and
| industry. A good majority of USSR pipelines run through
| the Ukraine. I'm not saying it's okay for them to invade,
| but i can see what they seek to gain and why exactly they
| fear NATO expansion all that much.
|
| I personally don't see a similar gain to be had from
| China invading Taiwan, at least right now. They have lots
| to lose and little to gain. Taiwans semiconductor
| industry is useless without western IP, lithography
| equipment and customers. There are even emergency plans
| to destroy taiwans fabs in case of invasion. And that's
| beside the damage done to mainland China itself.
|
| But as i stated, this may very well change when they get
| more desperate. Hussein fully knew the consequences of
| screwing with the wests oil supply, but the desperation
| was too acute.
|
| I just don't buy irrationality, there's always something
| to be had or something to lose. It may be entirely
| different from our view, but there's gotta be something.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Also Saddam was told by the US ambassador that the US has
| no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts...
| RCitronsBroker wrote:
| yup. there are more examples than i can muster up to
| write. One more gut-wrenching than the former. The US
| calling anyone irrational is pretty rich anyways. After
| all, invoking the use Brainwashing in war after war,
| instead of accepting the existence of differing beliefs
| isn't the pinnacle of rationality either. Neither is
| kidnapping your own people in an attempt to build your
| own brand of LSD-based brainwashing. Neither is
| infiltrating civil rights movements, going so far as
| attempting to bully MLK into suicide. Neither is spending
| your people's tax money on 638 foiled assassinations of
| Castro. Neither is committing false-flag genocides in
| Vietnam, or PSYOPing civilians into believing they are
| haunted by the souls of their relatives.
|
| none of those claims are anything but proven, historical
| facts by the way.
|
| Wanna lose your appetite? The leadership in charge of the
| described operations in Vietnam gleefully talked about
| their management genius. They implemented kill quotas.
|
| this list also is everything but exhaustive.
| dgroshev wrote:
| Problem is, "rational" is not objective. "Rational" is
| more like "consistent with one's goals (subjective) under
| one's perception of reality (subjective)".
|
| When you're saying "Putin invaded Ukraine irrationally"
| you're implicitly projecting your own value system and
| worldview onto him.
|
| Let's take goals. What do you think Putin's goals are? I
| don't think it's too fanciful to imagine that welfare of
| ordinary Russians is less important to him than going
| down in history as someone who reunited the lost Russian
| Empire, or even just keeping in power and adored. It's
| just a fact that the occupation of Crimea was extremely
| popular and raised his ratings, so why not try the same
| thing again?
|
| What about the worldview? It is well established that
| Putin didn't think much of Ukraine's ability to defend,
| having been fed overly positive reports by his servile
| underlings. Hell, even Pentagon thought Ukraine will
| fold, shipping weapons that would work well for guerrilla
| warfare (Javelins) and dragging their feet on stuff
| regular armies need (howitzers and shells). Russians did
| think it'll be a walk in the park, they even had a truck
| of crowd control gear in that column attacking Kyiv,
| thinking they'll need police shields.
|
| So when you put yourself into Putin's shoes, attacking
| Ukraine Just Makes Sense: a cheap&easy way to boost
| ratings and raise his profile in history books, what not
| to like? It is completely rational -- for his goals and
| his perceived reality.
|
| Sadly, people often fall into the trap of overextending
| their own worldview/goals onto others, finding a
| mismatch, and trying to explain that mismatch away with
| semi-conspiratorial thinking (Nato expansion! Pipelines!
| Russian speakers!) instead of reevaluating the premise.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I don't accept the subjectivity w.r.t. "perceived
| reality". Russia's military unreadiness was one of the
| big reasons I consider the invasion irrational, and I put
| the blame squarely on Putin because he _could_ have
| gotten accurate reports if he wasn 't such a bad leader.
| You are responsible for your perceived reality, and part
| of rationality is acting in a way that it matches real
| reality.
|
| (But yeah, clearly his actual goal was to increase his
| personal prestige. Is that not common knowledge yet?)
| sd1010 wrote:
| Russia doesn't frear NATO - see their reaction on Finland
| joining it. Also the pipelines were not the reason for
| invasion. They were the opposite - a deterrence. As soon
| as Russia built pipelines that were circumventing
| Ukraine, they decided to invade, thinking that the gas
| transmition would't be in danger now.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > the way the borders of Iraq were re-drawn, Iraq was
| completely cut off from any sources of fresh water.
|
| In the geography which with I am familiar, Iraq has two
| incredibly famous rivers and the Persian Gulf is actually
| salt water.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > they are one broken dam away from a huge mass casualty
| event.
|
| Are there any dam-having countries for which this isn't the
| case?
| RCitronsBroker wrote:
| none or VERY few are even remotely close to the impact a
| potential breach of the three gorges dam would have. [1]
| Seriously, it's worth reading up on, it's genuinely hard to
| overstate.
|
| [1]: https://www.ispsw.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/09/718_Lin.pdf
|
| "In this case, the Three Gorges Dam may become a military
| target. But if this happens, it would be devastating to
| China as 400 million people live downstream, as well as the
| majority of the PLA's reserve forces that are located
| midstream and downstream of the Yangtze River."
| maxglute wrote:
| It's grossly overstated because TW doesn't have the type
| or numbers of ordnance to structurally damage gravity dam
| the size of three gorges. And realistically they won't
| because the amount of conventional munitions needed is
| staggering, more than TW can muster in retaliatory
| strike, unless it's a coordinated preemptive strike,
| which TW won't since it's suicide by war crime.
|
| The entire three gorges meme originated from
| FaLunGong/Epoche times propaganda, including in linked
| article (to interview with Simone Gao) and all the dumb
| google map photos of deformed damn due to lens
| distortion. PRC planners there aren't concerned about dam
| breech, but general infra terrorism.
|
| The onne infra PRC planners are concerned about are
| coastal nuclear plants under construction, which is much
| better ordnance trade for TW anyway, and just as much of
| a war crime.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| "This article first appeared in The Times of Israel on
| September 11, 2020."
|
| Also what does "400 million people live downstream" even
| mean? There's ten million people living downstream of
| this dam
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Dam_(Troy), and ten
| million more living downstream of the various Mississippi
| dams and so on.
| dchftcs wrote:
| >What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks
| had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy
| dividends due to cost cutting and "coasting"
|
| Not clear about what the role of activist hedge funds is here
| but Intel's top shareholders are mutual funds like Vanguard
| which are part of many people's retirement investments. If an
| activist hedge fund got to run the show, it means that they
| could get these passive shareholders on their side or to
| abstain. It would have meant those funds along with pension
| funds, who should have been in a place to push back against
| short term thinking, didn't push back. These funds should
| really be run much more competently given their outsized
| influence, but the incentives are not there.
| pas wrote:
| there's probably no need to imagine this conspiracy-like
| machinations of shareholders. Intel fucked up bad _and_
| process development is certified crazytrain to la la land.
|
| (dropping molten tin 1000 times a second and then shooting it
| with a laser just to get a lamp that can bless you with the
| hard light you need for your fancy fine few nanometers thin
| shadows? sure, why not, but don't forget to shoot the plasma
| ball with a weaker pulse to nudge it into the shape of a
| lens, cheerio.
|
| and you know that all other parts are similarly scifi
| sounding.
|
| and their middle management got greedy and they were bleeding
| talent for a decade.)
| throwaway4good wrote:
| What I worry about with Intel is that they have gotten too much
| into politics; relying on CHIPS act and other subsidies,
| encouraging sanctions on Chinese competitors while relying on
| full access to the Chinese market for sales.
|
| It is not a good long term strategy: The winds of politics may
| change, politicians may set more terms (labour and
| environment), foreign market access may become politicized too
| (US politicians will have to sell chips like they sell
| airplanes on foreign trips).
|
| So Intel will end up like the old US car makers or Boeing - no
| longer driven by technological innovation but instead by its
| relationship to Washington.
| hardware2win wrote:
| Have you read chip war?
|
| It will challenge your concerns
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Yeah. Too much the cold war angle. I think he overstates
| the role of government/military and underestimates how much
| the consumer market has driven the process innovations that
| has made computing cheap and ubiquitous,
| davidy123 wrote:
| "This investment, at a time when ... wages war against utter
| wickedness, a war in which good must defeat evil, is an
| investment in the right and righteous values that spell
| progress for humanity"
|
| That is not a partner for creating logical systems. Very
| clear their current decisions are political.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| That bananas quote is from an Israeli minister.
|
| Imagine what it would do if Intel became strongly
| associated with one side in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
| It could really hurt their business.
|
| Usually business leaders are smart enough to stay out of
| politics.
| davidy123 wrote:
| Apparently they have become strongly associated since
| that quote is part of the release for their new plant. It
| is sickening to me this kind of hard-right religious
| zealotry is part of decisions of tech companies. I am
| avoiding Intel as much as possible now, I hope others
| will consider this too.
| UberFly wrote:
| That quote didn't come out of Intel's mouth.
| davidy123 wrote:
| It is directly associated with the deal they are making.
| Would you let that quote be used with a deal your company
| is making? Intel knows full well how this is being spun.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| They are taking sides. That is easily seen during an
| interview with the CEO, who almost cried talking about
| the events of October 7th. Intel will give 5000$ war
| grant to the Israeli employees. One of Intel's largest
| fabs is a 20-minute drive from where the massacres
| occurred.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Do you know if AMD has any presence in Israel? Intel has
| already sold me multiple garbage dump products in the
| past and so if I can minimize my Israel related purchases
| i'd prefer to do that.
|
| The Mac is annoying since I think some pieces of their
| silicon designs come from Israel (storage controller).
| Can someone correct me if I am wrong on that?
| myth_drannon wrote:
| AMD is big in Israel as well. Most of the tech stuff is
| developed in Israel, side effects of future-oriented
| democracy I imagine. Boycotting things is useless virtue
| signalling of the woke disease. I would suggest going to
| pro-Palestinian protests and try to explain to them that
| raping, kidnapping and mutilating children is not going
| to bring peace and a country to Palestinians.
| davidy123 wrote:
| It's fine to be future oriented, to share development,
| the problem is any religious destiny/racist element.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "woke disease," but
| consumerism involves evaluation.
|
| Oct 7 was horrible, but it didn't come out of nowhere.
| Sabra and Shatila, for example (Waltz with Bashir being a
| very good Israeli film on the topic), and the many
| thousands of people killed mutilated or displaced in
| their usual unhelpfully disproportionate response..
| nebula8804 wrote:
| How is AMD big in Israel?
| xw39011 wrote:
| What company doing VLSI, with more than say 500
| employees, doesn't have some kind of presence in Israel?
| That's got to be a short list.
| sentinalien wrote:
| Basically all the big semiconductor companies do R&D in
| Israel
| davidy123 wrote:
| Yes, but it's all relative. A giant new development is
| different than a branch office. Though in all cases there
| is no doubt overlap with their military industrial
| complex. But I don't think we will normally see such
| religious extremism tied to projects, and that should be
| called out, loudly and clearly, as not ok.
| King1st wrote:
| Intel has used political incentives often though its history
| to great effect. I think its a much smaller issue than you
| think. Its part of their standard game-plan for over 30
| years. The issue with boeing is becoming acontract company
| that into contracts out all their work which is self
| defeating and leads to brain drain. EX: the door lacking
| bolts because Boeing doesnt even build its own fuselages
| anymore and have let their standards fall, wholly depending
| on contractors with little oversight.
| mst wrote:
| Boeing was culturally taken over by McDonnell Douglas
| leadership.
|
| What's fascinating albeit somewhat depressing is that it
| seems something similar happened when McDonnell merged
| with/took over Douglas as well:
| https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-legal-and-moral-
| questi...
| epolanski wrote:
| > I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing
| the towel
|
| 1) Intel is up 100% from ten years ago when it was at $ 23. All
| that despite revenue being flat/negative, inflation and costs
| rising and margins collapsing.
|
| 2) Intel is up 60% in the last 12 months alone.
|
| Doesn't look to me like they throwing the towel at all.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| You should be bullish on intel, they got so much TSMC and
| Samsung trade secrets through the chips act that it would be a
| miracle to mess that up.
| jonplackett wrote:
| How did that work?
| adrian_b wrote:
| There is a good chance for Intel to recover, but that remains
| to be proven.
|
| From their long pipeline of future CMOS manufacturing processes
| with which Intel hopes to close the performance gap between
| them and TSMC, for now there exists a single commercial
| product: Meteor Lake, which consists mostly of chips made by
| TSMC, with one single Intel 4 die, the CPU tile.
|
| The Meteor Lake CPU seems to have finally reached the energy
| efficiency of the TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago, but
| it also has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock
| frequencies, exactly like Ice Lake in the past, so once more
| Intel has been forced to accompany Meteor Lake with Raptor Lake
| Refresh made in the old technology, to cover the high-
| performance segment.
|
| Nevertheless, Meteor Lake demonstrates reaching the first step
| with Intel 4.
|
| If they will succeed to launch on time and with good
| performance, later this year, their server products based on
| Intel 3, that will be a much stronger demonstration of their
| real progress than this Meteor Lake preview, which has also
| retained their old microarchitecture for the big cores, so it
| shows nothing new there.
|
| Only by the end of 2024 it will become known whether Intel has
| really become competitive again, after seeing the Arrow Lake
| microarchitecture and the Intel 20A manufacturing process.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago
|
| N5 is interesting because it's the first process fully
| designed around EUV and because it was pretty much exclusive
| to Apple for almost two years. It launched in Apple products
| in late 2020, then crickets until about late 2022 (Zen 4, RTX
| 4000, Radeon 7000). Launches of the other vendors were still
| on N7 or older processes in 2020 - RTX 3000 for example used
| some 10nm Samsung process in late 2020. All of those were DUV
| (including Intel 7 / 10ESF). That's the step change we are
| looking at.
| ajross wrote:
| Exactly. N5 is sort of an outlier, it's a process where a
| bunch of technology bets and manufacturing investment all
| came together to produce a big leap in competitive
| positioning. It's the same kind of thing we saw with Intel
| 22nm[1], where Ivy Bridge was just wiping the floor with
| the rest of the industry.
|
| Improvements since have been modest, to the extent that N3
| is only barely any better (c.f. the Apple M3 is... still a
| really great CPU, but not actually that much of an upgrade
| over the M2).
|
| There's a hole for Intel to aim at now. We'll see.
|
| [1] Also 32nm and 45nm, really. It's easy to forget now,
| but Intel strung together a just shocking number of
| dominant processes in the 00's.
| ajross wrote:
| > The Meteor Lake CPU [...] has obvious difficulties in
| reaching high clock frequencies,
|
| Not sure where that's coming from? The released parts are
| mobile chips, and the fastest is a 45W TDP unit that boosts
| at 5.1GHz. AMD's fastest part in that power range (8945HS)
| reaches 5.2GHz. Apple seems to do just fine at 4GHz with the
| M3.
|
| I'm guessing you're looking at some numbers for socketed
| chips with liquid cooling?
| adrian_b wrote:
| The 5.1 GHz Intel Core Ultra 9 processor 185H is the
| replacement for the 5.4 GHz Intel Core i9-13900H Processor
| of previous year. Both are 45-W CPUs with big integrated
| GPUs and almost identical features in the SoC.
|
| No liquid cooling needed for either of them, just standard
| 14" or 15" laptops without special cooling, or NUC-like
| small cases, because they do not need discrete GPUs.
|
| Both CPUs have the same microarchitecture of the big cores.
|
| If Intel had been able to match the clock frequencies of
| their previous generation, they would have done that,
| because it is embarrassing that Meteor Lake wins only the
| multi-threaded benchmarks, due to the improved energy
| efficiency, but loses in the single-threaded benchmarks,
| due to lower turbo clock frequency, when compared to the
| last year's products.
|
| Moreover, Intel could easily have launched a Raptor Lake
| Refresh variant of i9-13900H, with a clock frequency
| increased to 5.6 GHz. They have not done this only to avoid
| an internal competition for Meteor Lake, so they have
| launched only HX models of Raptor Lake Refresh, which do
| not compete directly with Meteor Lake (because they need a
| discrete GPU).
|
| During the last decade, the products made at TSMC with
| successive generations of their processes had a continuous
| increase of their clock frequencies.
|
| On the other hand Intel had a drop in clock frequency at
| all switches in the manufacturing processes, at 14-nm with
| the first Broadwell models, then at 10-nm with Cannon Lake
| and Ice Lake (and even Tiger Lake could not reach clock
| frequencies high enough for desktops), and now with Meteor
| Lake in the new Intel 4 process.
|
| With the 14-nm and 10-nm (now rebranded as Intel 7), Intel
| has succeeded to greatly increase the maximum clock
| frequencies after many years of tuning and tweaking. Now,
| with Meteor Lake, this will not happen, because they will
| pass immediately to different better manufacturing
| processes.
|
| According to rumors, the desktop variant of Arrow Lake,
| i.e. Arrow Lake S, will be manufactured at TSMC in order to
| ensure high-enough clock frequencies, and not with the
| Intel 20A, which will be used only for the laptop products.
|
| Intel 18A is supposed to be the process that Intel will be
| able to use for several years, like their previous
| processes. It remains to be seen how much time will pass
| until Intel will become able to reach again 6.0 GHz in the
| Intel 18A process.
| ajross wrote:
| That's getting a little convoluted. I still don't see how
| this substantiates that Intel 4 "has obvious difficulties
| in reaching high clock frequencies".
|
| Intel is shipping competitive clock frequencies on Intel
| 4 vs. everyone in the industry _except_ the most recent
| generation of their own RPL parts, which have the
| advantage of being being up-bins of an evolved and mature
| process.
|
| That sounds pretty normal to me? New processes launch
| with conservative binning and as yields improve you can
| start selling the outliers in volume. And... it seems
| like you agree, by pointing out that this happened with
| Intel 7 and 14nm too.
|
| Basically: this sounds like you're trying to spin routine
| manufacturing practices as a technical problem. Intel
| bins differently than AMD (and especially Apple, who
| barely distinguish parts at all), and they always have.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I have also pointed that while for Intel this repeats
| their previous two process launches, which is not a good
| sign, TSMC has never had such problems recently.
|
| While one reason why TSMC did not have such problems is
| that they have made more incremental changes from one
| process variant to another, avoiding any big risks, the
| other reason is that Intel has repeatedly acted as if
| they had been unable to estimate from simulations the
| performance characteristics of their future processes and
| they have always been caught by surprise by inferior
| experimental results compared to predictions, so they
| always had to switch the product lines from plan A to
| plan B during the last decade, unlike the previous decade
| when all appeared to always go as planned.
|
| A normal product replacement strategy is for the new
| product to match most of the characteristics of the old
| product that is replaced, but improve on a few of them.
|
| Much too frequently in recent years many Intel new
| products have improved some characteristics only with the
| price of making worse other characteristics. For example
| raising the clock frequency with the price of also
| increased power consumption, increasing the number of
| cores but removing AVX-512, or, like in Meteor Lake,
| raising the all-cores-active clock-frequency with the
| price of lowering the few-cores-active clock frequency.
|
| While during the last decade Intel has frequently
| progressed in the best case by making two steps forward
| and one step backward, all competitors have marched
| steadily forwards.
| ajross wrote:
| > I have also pointed that while for Intel this repeats
| their previous two process launches, which is not a good
| sign, TSMC has never had such problems recently.
|
| I'll be blunt: you're interpreting a "problem" where none
| exists. I went back and checked: when Ivy Bridge parts
| launched the 22nm process ( _UNDENIABLY_ the best process
| in the world at that moment, and by quite a bit) the
| highest-clocked part from Intel was actually a 4.0 GHz
| _Sandy Bridge_ SKU, and would be for a full 18 months
| until the 4960X matched it.
|
| This is just the way Intel ships CPUs. They bin like
| crazy and ship dozens and dozens of variants. The parts
| at the highest end need to wait for yields to improve to
| the point where there's enough volume to sell. That's not
| a "problem", it's just a manufacturing decision.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There are a few areas where they are under pressure:
|
| - The wintel monopoly is losing its relevance now that ARM
| chips are creeping into the windows laptop market and now that
| Apple has proven that ARM is fantastic for low power & high
| performance solutions. Nobody cares about x86 that much any
| more. It's lost its shine as the "fastest" thing available.
|
| - AI & GPU market is where the action is and Intel is a no-show
| for that so far. It's not about adding AI/GPU features to cheap
| laptop chips but about high end workstations and dedicated
| solutions for large scale compute. Intel's GPUs lack
| credibility for this so far. Apple's laptops seem popular with
| AI researchers lately and the goto high performance solutions
| seem to be provided by NVidia.
|
| - Apple has been leading the way with ARM based, high
| performance integrated chips powering phones, laptops, and
| recently AR/VR. Neither AMD nor Intel have a good answer to
| that so far. Though AMD at least has a foothold in the door
| with e.g. Xbox and the Steam Deck depending on their integrated
| chips and them still having credible solutions for gaming.
| Nvidia also has lots of credibility in this space.
|
| - Cloud computing is increasingly shifting to cheap ARM powered
| hardware. Mostly the transition is pretty seamless. Cost and
| energy usage are the main drivers here.
| hardware2win wrote:
| They will be manufacturing those ARM cpus
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Has that been announced? Or is it more a matter of Intel
| producing some unannounced product on an unannounced
| timeline with a feature set that has yet to be announced on
| an architecture that may or may not involve arm? Intel
| walking away from x86 would be a big step for them. First
| they don't own arm and second all their high end stuff is
| x86.
| hardware2win wrote:
| They will be manufacturing them for their customers.
|
| Also arm isa is just isa
|
| You seem to focus on it too much when it isnt THAT
| relevant.
|
| Isa doesnt imply perf/energy characteristics
| nsteel wrote:
| They announced this last year: https://www.intel.com/cont
| ent/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...
| ajross wrote:
| > Apple has proven that ARM is fantastic for low power & high
| performance solutions
|
| Apple has proven that _Apple Silicon_ on TSMC 's best process
| is great. There are no other ARM vendors competing well in
| that space yet. SOCs that need to compete with Intel and AMD
| on the same nodes are still stuck at the low margin end of
| the market.
| lr1970 wrote:
| The biggest Intel's problem is that a lot of good people left
| over the previous years of shitty management. Pouring money
| into R&D certainly helps but with wrong people in key positions
| the efficiency of the investments will be low.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This blog
|
| https://semiaccurate.com/
|
| has told the story for more than a decade that Intel has been
| getting high on its own supply and that the media has been
| uncritical of the stories it tells.
|
| In particular I think when it comes to the data center they've
| forgotten their roots. They took over the data center in the
| 1990s because they were producing desktop PCs in such numbers
| they could afford to get way ahead of the likes of Sun
| Microsystems, HP, and SGI. Itanium failed out of ignorance and
| hubris but if they were true evil geniuses they couldn't have
| made a better master plan to wipe out most of the competition
| for the x86 architecture.
|
| Today they take the desktop for granted and make the false
| claim that their data center business is more significant (not
| what the financial numbers show.). It's highly self-destructive
| because when they pander to Amazon, Amazon takes the money they
| save and spends it on developing Graviton. There is some
| prestige in making big machines for the national labs but it is
| an intellectual black hole because the last thing they want to
| do is educate anyone else on how to simulate hydrogen bombs in
| VR.
|
| So we get the puzzle that most of the performance boost
| customers could be getting comes from SIMD instructions and
| other "accelerators" but Intel doesn't make a real effort to
| get this technology working for anyone other than the Facebook
| and the national labs and, in particular, they drag their feet
| in getting it available on enough chips that it is is worth it
| for mainstream developers to use this technology.
|
| A while back, IBM had this thing where they might ship you a
| mainframe with 50 cores and license you to use 30 and if you
| had a load surge you could call you up and they could turn on
| another 10 cores at a high price.
|
| I was fooled when I heard this the first time and thought it
| was smart business but after years of thinking about how to
| deliver value to customers I realized it's nothing more than
| "vice signaling". It makes them look rapacious and avaricious
| but really somebody is paying for those 20 cores and if it is
| not the customer it is the shareholders. It's not impossible
| that IBM and/or the customer winds up ahead in the situation
| but the fact is they paid to make those 20 cores and if those
| cores are sitting there doing nothing they're making no value
| for anyone. If everything was tuned up perfectly they might
| make a profit by locking them down, but it's not a given at all
| that it is going to work out that way.
|
| Similarly Intel has been hell-bent to fuse away features on
| their chips so often you get a desktop part that has a huge die
| area allocated to AVX features that you're not allowed to use.
| Either the customer or the shareholders are paying to fabricate
| a lot of transistors the customer doesn't get to use. It's
| madness but except for Charlie Demerjian the whole computer
| press pretends it is normal.
|
| Apple bailed out on Intel because Intel failed to stick to its
| roadmap to improve their chips (they're number one why try
| harder?) and they are lucky to have customers that accept that
| a new version of MacOS can drop older chips which means _MacOS
| benefits from features that were introduced more than ten years
| ago_. Maybe Intel and Microsoft are locked in a deadly embrace
| but their saving grace is that every ARM vendor other than
| Apple has failed to move the needle on ARM performance since
| 2017, which itself has to be an interesting story that I
| haven't seen told.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > and they are lucky to have customers that accept that a new
| version of MacOS can drop older chips
|
| Indeed, Apple has shown not just once but multiple times that
| they'll happily blow up their entire development ecosystem,
| whether it's software (Mac Finder vs. MacOS X) or hardware
| (68k, PPC, Intel, and now ARM). I think Intel didn't expect
| Apple to switch architectures so quickly and thoroughly and
| got caught flat-footed.
| xw39011 wrote:
| > every ARM vendor other than Apple has failed to move the
| needle on ARM performance since 2017
|
| You must mean, performance relative to Intel, not absolute
| performance. Clearly Qualcomm has improved Snapdragon over
| time as have a number of other Android SOC vendors.
|
| But I wonder if it's even true, have ARM vendors other than
| Apple failed to move the needle on performance (let's call
| performance single thread geekbench) relative to Intel? If
| someone is up for tracking down all the numbers I'd read that
| blog post. :)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > This sudden shock of "we're going to invest everything in R&D
| and catch back up" was news that a lot of intel shareholders
| didn't want to hear. They dumped the stock and the price
| adjusted in kind.
|
| Why the fuck are shareholders often so short-sighted?
|
| Or do they just genuinely think the R&D investment won't pay
| off?
| krautt wrote:
| i worked at intel between 97 and 07. MFG was absolute king.
| Keeping that production line stable and active was the priority
| that eclipsed all. i was a process engineer, and to change a gas
| flow rate on some part of the process by a little bit, i'd have
| to design an experiment, collect data for months, work with
| various upstream/downstream teams, and write a change control
| proposal that would exceed a hundred pages of documentation.
| AFAIK, that production line was the most complex human process
| that had happened to date. It was mostly ran by 25-30 yo
| engineers. That in itself was a miracle.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| You can not innovate without competition. AMD will stagnate too
| without Intel or another company competing.
|
| I am hoping Intel rights its wrongs so they can stay competitive.
| It takes a good amount of competition to keep businesses honest.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| Stop humbling them, I still own a bunch of stock.
| culebron21 wrote:
| That much of text, of no use to most in the tech field...
| Discussions on big tech seem to me like those on geopolitics.
| bernardlunn wrote:
| Brilliant article. He is totally right that what Pat Gelsinger is
| doing is as brave as what Andy Grove did and just as essential.
| In hindsight Andy Grove was 100% right and I hope Pat Gelsinger
| is proved right.
|
| The fact that Intel stock went up during the Brian Krzanich
| tenure as CEO is simply a reflection of that being the free money
| era that lifted all boats/stocks. Without that we would be
| writing Intel's epitaph now.
|
| You cannot play offense in tech when there is a big market shift.
| mixedbit wrote:
| Isn't the current GPU-based stack which drives the progress of AI
| an early stage architecture which will become sub-optimal and
| obsolete in a longer term?
|
| Having separate processors with separate memory and separate
| software stack to do matrix operations works, but it would be
| much more convenient and productive to have a system with one RAM
| and CPUs that can efficiently do matrix operations and would not
| require the programmer to delegate these operations to a separate
| stack. Event the name 'Graphics Processing Unit' suggest that the
| current approach for AI is rather hacky.
|
| Because of this, in a long run there can an opportunity for Intel
| and other CPU manufacturers to regain the lucrative market from
| NVIDIA.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The software stack co-evolves with the hardware, if the
| hardware can't do something fast then the software guys can't
| necessarily even try it out.
|
| People have been trying to break NVIDIA's moat by creating non-
| GPU accelerators. The core maths operations aren't that varied
| so it's an obvious thing to try. Nothing worked, not even
| NVIDIA's own attempts. AI researchers have a software stack
| oriented around devices with separate memory and it's
| abstracted, so unifying CPU and GPU ram doesn't seem to make a
| big difference for them.
|
| Don't be fooled by the name GPU. It's purely historical. "GPUs"
| used for AI don't have any video output capability. I think you
| can't even render with them. They are just specialised
| computers come with their own OS ("driver"), compilers, APIs
| and dev stack, which happen to need a CPU to bring them online
| and which communicate via PCIe instead of ethernet.
| drBonkers wrote:
| How do the new "TPUs" and "NPUs" slot into your perspective
| of GPUs? Just nomenclature catching up to describe matrix
| math, ML GPUs without video output?
| goriloser wrote:
| Fast memory is very expensive.
|
| Which is why you only use it when you really need it - on a
| GPU/AI accelerator.
| drumhead wrote:
| With the US re-industrialising, semi-conductors are a strategic
| priority so Intel will be at the heart of the process. They're
| going to be a major beneficiary of the process, here and in
| Europe. They'll be a significant player.
|
| They got lazy and sat on their laurels when AMD was struggling
| and they didnt view ARM as a threat. TSMC was a probably a joke
| to them...until everyone brought out killer products and Intel
| had no response to them. They could have been way ahead of the
| pack by now but they decided to harvest the market instead of
| innovating aggresively. Right now they're worth less than $200bn,
| which is less than half of Broadcom or TSMC, its 30% less than
| AMD and 10% of Nvidia. Is it intrisically worth that little?
| Probably not, I think its a buy at this price.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| Intel has made a lot of mistakes, but I'm reluctant to bash a
| company that's contributed such a vast amount to human
| civilization. The insights and innovations pushed forward by
| Intel in its heyday have delivered incalculable benefits to
| billions of humans and will benefit billions more for the rest of
| human history. Their recent history is checkered but the overall
| grade for Intel is A+ : staggering success.
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